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LANGUAGE
IN ACTION

A Guide to

ACCURATE THINKING
READING and WRITING

5. /. Haya\awa

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH

ILLINOIS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

NEW YORK
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY

1947

All rights reserved. No part of this hook may he rc-
produced in any form, by mimeograph or any other
means, without permission in ivriting from the publisher.

[h • 10 • 46]

PHINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

PREFACE

WHAT this book hopes to do is to offer a general system
for clearing the mind of harmful obstructions. It is an
attempt to apply certain scientific and literary principles, or, as
we may call them, semantic principles, to the thinking, talking,
listening, reading, and writing we do in everyday life.

Everyone knows how an engine, although in perfect repair,
can overheat, lose its efficiency, and stop as the result of in-
ternal obstructions — sometimes even very minute ones. Every-
one has noticed, too, how human minds, also apparendy in
perfect repair, often overheat and stop as the result of dogmas,
received opinions, or private obsessions. Sometimes a set of
obsessions may seize multitudes of people at once, so that
hysteria becomes epidemic and nations go mad. The recur-
rence of such disorders tempts many of us to conclude that
there are fundamental and incurable defects in "human na-
ture." The fudlity of such an attitude needs hardly to be re-
marked upon. Many modern studies, notably in psychology,
anthropology, linguistics, and literary criticism, reveal to us the
nature and origin of these obstructions in our intellectual ma-
chinery. Can we not, by seeking and removing them, get it to
run more efficiently.? We do not scold an engine for over-
heating, any more than we scold a man for having a fever.
Are we getting anywhere by merely scolding each other for
"lack of principle," "stupidity," "intellectual laziness," and all
the other sins we accuse each other oi?

The trouble human beings have in learning anything,
whether from discussion, from experience, from historical
events, from books, or from teachers, does not as a rule arise
from the intrinsic difficulty of the lessons to be learned. It

IV PREFACE

arises rather from the fact that before any new notions can be
grasped, we have so much to z^wlearn: our cherished senti-
mentahties, our inherited dogmas, our superstitions, our pet
intellectual cliches — all serving to nullify, distort, or caricature
beyond recognition the lessons we receive. As an American
humorist has said, "What's wrong with most people is not
their ignorance, but the number of things they know which
ain't so."

Perhaps the best time for the systematic study of semantic
principles is early in the college course. The freshman enters
college wide open to new ideas and new techniques, eager
to have his intellectual machinery overhauled and made
ready for the exacting tasks ahead. And in fact, experimental
tryout of Language in Action in two preliminary editions
which were used by some five thousand students in nearly
fifty colleges — chiefly in freshman English — clearly indicates
the advantage of such early application of semantic principles.

These semantic principles I have drawn mainly from the
"General Semantics" (or "non-Aristotelian system") of Alfred
Korzybski. I have also drawn considerably from the work
done in more specialized fields of semantics by other distin-
guished writers: especially I. A. Richards, C. K. Ogden,
Bronislaw Malinowski, Leonard Bloomfield, Eric Temple Bell,
Thurman Arnold, Jean Piaget, Lucien Levy-Bruhl, Karl Brit-
ton, and Rudolf Carnap.

The necessity of synthesizing the often conflicting termi-
nologies and sometimes conflicting views of these and other
authorities has produced a result that will probably com-
pletely satisfy none of them. I make here my apologies to them
all for the liberties I have taken with their work: the omis-
sions, the distortions, the changes of emphasis, which in some
cases are so great that the originators of the theories may well
have difficulty in recognizing them as their own. If mistaken
impressions have been given of any of their views, or if.

PREFACE V

through the omission of quotation marks around words of
misleading implications (such as "mind," "intellect," "emo-
tion"), I have increased rather than reduced the difficulties of
the subject, the fault is mine. Whenever such unscientific
terms have been used, however, they have been the result of
the exigencies of idiomatic expression rather than the result of
willful negligence. I have usually attempted (although not
always successfully, perhaps) to remove in the surrounding
context the erroneous implications of popular terminology.

In an attempt at popular synthesis such as this, I have
thought it wiser not to try to make individual acknowledg-
ments of my borrowings, since this could hardly be done
without making the pages unduly formidable in appearance.
Therefore the following brief list of works to which I am es-
pecially indebted will have to serve in lieu of footnotes and a
more detailed bibliography.

Thurman W. Arnold, The Symbols of Government, Yale Uni-
versity Press, 1935.

The Folklore of Capitalism, Yale University Press, 1937.

A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, Oxford University Press,
1936.

Eric Temple Bell, The Search for Truth, Reynal and Hitchcock,

1934-

Men of Mathematics, Simon and Schuster, 1937.

Leonard Bloomfield, Language, Henry Holt and Company, 1933.

Boris E. Bogoslovsky, The Technique of Controversy, Harcourt,
Brace and Company, 1928.

P. W. Bridgman, The Logic of Modern Physics, The Macmillan
Company, 1927.

Karl Britton, Communication: A Philosophical Study of Language,
Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1939.

Rudolf Carnap, Philosophy and Logical Syntax, Psyche Miniatures
(London), 1935.

Stuart Chase, The Tyranny of Words, Harcourt, Brace and Com-
pany, 1938.

VI PREFACE

Felix S. Cohen, "Transcendental Nonsense and the Functional Ap-
proach," Columbia Law Review, Vol. 35, pp. 809-849 (June,

1935)-

Committee on the Function of English in General Education,
Language in General Education (Report for the Commission
on Secondary School Curriculum), D. Appleton-Century
Company, 1940.

John Dewey, How We Thin\, D. C. Heath and Company, 1933.

William Empson, Seven "Types of Ambiguity, Chatto and Windus
(London), 1930.

Ernest Fenellosa, The Chinese Written Character (ed. Ezra
Pound), Stanley Nott (London), 1936.

Jerome Frank, Law and the Modern Mind, Brentano's, 1930 (also
Tudor Publishing Company, 1936).

Lancelot Hogben, Mathematics for the Million, W. W. Norton
and Company, 1937.

T. E. Hulme, Speculations, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1924.

H. R. Huse, The Illiteracy of the Literate, D. Appleton-Century
Company, 1933.

Wendell Johnson, Language and Speech Hygiene: An Application
of General Semantics, Institute of General Semantics (Chi-
cago), 1939.

Alfred Korzybski, The Manhood of Humanity, E. P. Dutton and
Company, 1921.

Science and Sanity: An Introduction to N on- Aristotelian

Systems and General Semantics, Science Press Printing Com-
pany (Lancaster, Pa.), 1933. Second edition, 1941.

Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public, Chatto and Windus
(London), 1932.

Irving J. Lee, "General Semantics and Public Speaking," Quarterly
journal of Speech, December, 1940.

Vernon Lee, The Handling of Words, Dodd, Mead and Company,
1923.^

Lucien Levy-Bruhl, How Natives Thin\, Alfred A. Knopf, 1926.

Kurt Lewin, Principles of Topological Psychology, McGraw-Hill
Book Company, 1936.

PREFACE Vll

B. Malinowski, "The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Lan-

guages," Supplement I in Ogden and Richards' The Meaning
of Meaning.

C. K. Ogden, Opposition: A Linguistic and Psychological Analysis,

Psyche Miniatures (London), 1932.
C. K. Ogden and \. A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning, Har-

court. Brace and Company, third edition, revised, 1930.
Jean Piaget, The Language and Thought of the Child, Harcourt,

Brace and Company, 1926.
The Child's Conception of the World, Harcourt, Brace and

Company, 1929.
Oliver L. Reiser, The Promise of Scientific Humanism, Oskar

Piest (Nevi' York), 1940.
L A. Richards, Science and Poetry, W. W, Norton and Company,

1926.

Practical Criticism, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1929.

The Philosophy of Rhetoric, Oxford University Press, 1936.

Interpretation in Teaching, Harcourt, Brace and Company,

1938.
James Harvey Robinson, The Mind in the Maying, Harper and

Brothers, 1921.
Edward Sapir, Language, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1921.
Vilhjalmur Stefansson, The Standardization of Error, W. W.

Norton and Company, 1927.
Allen Upward, The New Word: An Open Letter Addressed to

the Swedish Academy in Stoc\holm on the Meaning of the

Word IDEALIST, Mitchell Kennerley (New York), 1910.
Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, The Modern

Library.
A. P. Weiss, The Theoretical Basis of Human Behavior, R. G.

Adams and Company (Columbus, Ohio), 1925.
V. Welby, What Is Meaning? Macmillan and Company, 1903.

I am deeply indebted to many friends and colleagues
throughout the United States for their suggestions and criti-
cism, both by letter and in conversation, during the prepara-
tion of this book. I am grateful, too, to Professor C. Wright

Vlll PREFACE

Thomas o£ the University of Wisconsin and to Professor
Walter Hendricks of the Illinois Institute of Technology, who,
by encouraging my inquiries in this direction and by offering
me the opportunity to present these materials in the classroom,
did much to make this book possible. My greatest indebted-
ness, however, is to Alfred Korzybski. Without his system of
General Semantics, it appears to me difficult if not impossible
to systematize and make usable the array of linguistic infor-
mation, much of it new, now available from all quarters,
scientific, philosophical, and literary. His principles have in
one way or another influenced almost every page of this book,
and his friendly criticisms and patient comments have facili-
tated at every turn the task of writing it.

■' ° S. I. H.

Illinois Institute of Technology
Chicago

CONTENTS

A STORY WITH A MORAL I

1. THE IMPORTANCE OF LANGUAGE lO

2. SYMBOLS 19

3. REPORTS 30

4. CONTEXTS 42

5. WORDS THAT DON't INFORM 57

6. CONNOTATIONS 67

7. DIRECTIVE LANGUAGE 78

8. HOW WE KNOW WHAT WE KNOW 92

9. THE LITTLE MAN WHO WASN't THERE IO3

10. CLASSIFICATIONS II 4

11. THE TWO-VALUED ORIENTATION 12 J

12. AFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION 1 42

13. INTENSION AL ORIENTATION 1 64

14. RATS AND MEN 181

15. EXTENSIONAL ORIENTATION 193

READINGS 201

From Mark Twain, Oliver "Wendell Holmes, John
Steinbeck, Thurman Arnold, Stuart Chase, and Ben-
jamin Lee Whorf

2 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

The solution they finally hit upon, after much debate and
soul-searching, was this. They decided to give the unemployed
families "relief" of fifty dollars a month, but to insure against
the "pauperization" of the recipients, they decided that this
fifty dollars was to be accompanied by a moral lesson, to wit:
the obtaining of the assistance would be made so difficult,
humiliating, and disagreeable that there would be no temp-
tation for anyone to go through the process unless it was
absolutely necessary; the moral disapproval of the community
would be turned upon the recipients of the money at all times
in such a way that they would try hard to get "off relief" and
regain their "self-respect." Some even proposed that people
"on relief" be denied the vote, so that the moral lesson would
be more deeply impressed upon them. Others suggested that
their names be published at regular intervals in the news-
papers, so that there would be a strong incentive to get "off
relief." The city fathers had enough faith in the goodness of
human nature to expect that the recipients would be "grate-
ful," since they were "getting something for nothing," some-
thing which they "hadn't worked for."

When the plan was put into operation, however, the recipi-
ents of the "relief" checks proved to be an ungrateful, ugly
bunch. They seemed to resent the cross-examinations and in-
spections at the hands of the "relief investigators," who, they
said, "took advantage of a man's misery to snoop into every
detail of his private life." In spite of uphfting editorials in
A-town Tribune telling them how grateful they ought to be,
the recipients of the "relief" stubbornly refused to learn any
moral lessons, declaring that they were "just as good as any-
body else." When, for example, they permitted themselves the
rare luxury of a movie or an evening of bingo, their neighbors
looked at them sourly as if to say, "I work hard and pay my
taxes just in order to support bums like you in idleness and
pleasure." This attitude, which was fairly characteristic of

A STORY WITH A MORAL 3

those members of the community who still had jobs, further
embittered the "reUef" recipients, so that they showed even
less gratitude as time went on and were constantly on the
lookout for insults, real or imaginary, from people who might
think that they weren't "as good as anybody else." A number
of them took to moping all day long, to thinking that their
Hves had been "failures," and finally to committing suicide.
Others found that it was "hard to look their wives and
kiddies in the face," because they had "failed to provide."
They all found it difficult to maintain their club and fra-
ternal relationships, since they could not help feeling that their
fellow citizens despised them for having "sunk so low." Their
wives, too, were unhappy for the same reasons and gave up
their social activities. Children whose parents were "on relief"
felt inferior to classmates whose parents were not "public
charges." Some of these children developed inferiority com-
plexes which affected not only their grades at school, but their
careers after graduation. A couple of other relief recipients,
finally, felt they could stand their "loss of self-respect" no
longer and decided, after many efforts to gain honest jobs, to
earn money "by their own efforts," even if they had to go in
for robbery. They did so and were caught and sent to the
state penitentiary.

The depression, therefore, hit A-town very hard. The relief
policy had averted starvation, no doubt, but suicide, personal
quarrels, unhappy homes, the weakening of social organiza-
tions, the maladjustment of children, and, finally, crime, had
resulted during the hard times. The town was divided in two,
the "haves" and the "have-nots," so that there was "class
hatred." People shook their heads sadly and declared that it
all went to prove over again what they had known from the
beginning, that "giving people something for nothing" in-
evitably "demoralizes their character." The citizens of A-town

4 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

gloomily waited for "prosperity" to return, with less and less
hope as time went on.

The story of the other community, B-ville, was entirely
different. B-ville was a relatively isolated town, too far out of
the way to be reached by Rotary Club speakers and university
extension services. One of the aldermen, however, who was
something of an economist, explained to his fellow aldermen
that unemployment, like sickness, accident, fire, tornado, or
death, hits unexpectedly in modern society, irrespective of the
victim's merits or deserts. He went on to say that B-ville's
homes, parks, streets, industries, and everything else B-ville
was proud of had been built in part by the work of these
same people who were now unemployed. He then proposed
to apply a principle of insurance: that if the work these un-
employed people had previously done for the community
could be regarded as a form of "premium" paid to the com-
munity against a time of misfortune, payments now made to
them to prevent their starvation could be regarded as "in-
surance claims." He therefore proposed that all men of good
repute who had worked in the community in whatever line
of useful endeavor, whether as machinists, clerks, or bank
managers, be regarded as "citizen policyholders," having
"claims" against the city in the case of unemployment for
fifty dollars a month until such time as they might again be
employed. Naturally, he had to talk very slowly and patiently,
since the idea was entirely new to his fellow aldermen. But
he described his plan as a "straight business proposition," and
finally they were persuaded. They worked out the details as
to the conditions under which citizens should be regarded as
"policyholders" in the city's "social insurance plan" to every-
body's satisfaction and decided to give checks for fifty dollars
a month to the heads of each of B-ville's indigent families.

B-ville's "claim adjusters," whose duty it was to investigate
the "claims" of the "citizen policyholders," had a much better

A STORY WITH A MORAL J

time than A-town's "relief investigators." While the latter had
been resentfully regarded as "snoopers," the former, having
no moral lesson to teach but simply a business transaction to
carry out, treated their "policyholders" with businesslike cour-
tesy and got the same amount of information as the "relief
investigators" with considerably less difficulty. There were no
hard feelings. It further happened, fortunately, that news of
B-ville's plans reached a liberal newspaper editor in the big
city at the other end of the state. This writer described the
plan in a leading feature story headed "b-ville looks ahead.
Great Adventure in Social Pioneering Launched by Upper
Valley Community." As a result of this publicity, inquiries
about the plan began to come to the city hall even before the
first checks were mailed out. This led, naturally, to a con-
siderable feeling of pride on the part of the aldermen, who,
being "boosters," felt that this was a wonderful opportunity
to "put B-ville on the map."

Accordingly, the aldermen decided that instead of simply
mailing out the checks as they had originally intended, they
would publicly present the first checks at a monster civic
ceremony. They invited the governor of the state, who was
glad to come to bolster his none-too-enthusiastic support in
that locality, the president of the state university, the senator
from their district, and other functionaries. They decorated
the National Guard armory with flags and got out the Ameri-
can Legion Fife and Drum Corps, the Boy Scouts, and other
civic organizations. At the big celebration, each family to re-
ceive a "social insurance check" was marched up to the plat-
form to receive it, and the governor and the mayor shook
hands with each of them as they came trooping up in their
best clothes. Fine speeches were made; there was much cheer-
ing and shouting; pictures of the event showing the recipients
of the checks shaking hands with the mayor, and the gover-
nor patting the heads of the children, were published not only

6 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

in the local papers but also in several metropolitan rotogravure
sections.

Every recipient of these "insurance checks" had a feeling,
therefore, that he had been personally honored, that he lived
in a "wonderful little town," and that he could face his un-
employment with greater courage and assurance, since his
community was "back of him." The men and women found
themselves being kidded in a friendly way by their acquaint-
ances for having been "up there with the big shots," shaking
hands with the governor, etc. The children at school found
themselves envied for having had their pictures in the papers.
Altogether, B-ville's unemployed did not commit suicide,
were not haunted by a sense of failure, did not turn to crime,
did not get personal maladjustments, did not develop "class
hatred," as the result of their fifty dollars a month. . . .

At the conclusion of the Professor's story, the discussion
began :

"That just goes to show," said the Advertising Man, who
was known among his friends as a "realistic" thinker, "what
good promotional work can do. B-ville's city council had real
advertising sense, and that civic ceremony was a masterpiece
. . . made everyone happy . . . put over the scheme in a big
way. Reminds me of the way we do things in our business:
as soon as we called horse-mackerel tuna-fish, we developed
a big market for it. I suppose if you called relief 'insurance,'
you could actually get people to like it, couldn't you?"

"What do you mean, 'calUng' it insurance?" asked the
Social Worker. "B-ville's scheme wasn't relief at all. It was
insurance. That's what all such payments should be. What
gets me is the stupidity of A-town's city council and all people
like them in not realizing that what they call 'relief is simply
the payment of just claims which those unemployed have on
a community."

A STORY WITH A MORAL 7

"Good grief, man! Do you realize what you're saying?"
cried the Advertising Man in surprise. "Are you implying
that those people had any right to that money ? All I said was
that it's a good idea to disguise relief as insurance if it's going
to make people any happier. But it's still relief, no matter
what you call it. It's all right to kid the public along to re-
duce discontent, but we don't need to kid ourselves as well
as the public!"

"But they do have a right to that money! They're not
getting something for nothing. It's insurance. They did some-
thing for the community, and that's their prem — "

"Say, are you crazy?"

"Who's crazy?"

"You're crazy. Relief is relief, isn't it? If you'd only call
things by their right names . . ."

"But, confound it, insurance is insurance, isn't it?"

(Since the gentlemen are obviously losing their tempers, it
will be best to leave them. The Professor has already sneaked
out. When last heard of, not only had the quarrelers stopped
speaking to each other, but so had their wives — and the
Advertising Man was threatening to disinherit his son if he
didn't break off his engagement with the Social Worker's
daughter.)

This story has been told not to advance arguments in favor
of "social insurance" or "rehef" or for any other political and
economic system, but simply to show a fairly characteristic
sample of language in action. Do the words we use make as
much diflFerence in our lives as the story of A-town and
B-ville seems to indicate? We often talk about "choosing the
right words to express our thoughts," as if thinking were a
process entirely independent of the words we think in. But
is thinking such an independent process? Do the words wc
utter arise as a result of the thoughts we have, or are the

8 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

thoughts we have determined by the Hnguistic systems we
happen to have been taught?

The Advertising Man and the Social Worker seem to be
agreed that the results of B-ville's program w^ere good, so that
v/c can assume that their notions of what is socially desirable
are similar. Nevertheless, they cannot agree. Is it because of
ignorance on the part of one or the other or both that they
quarrel? This cannot be so, because, as the reader may verify
for himself by reading controversies in newspapers, maga-
zines, or even learned journals, well educated people are often
the cleverest in proving that insurance is really insurance or
that relief is really relief. Quarrels of this kind, therefore, are
especially bitter among social philosophers, lawyers, and pub-
licists.

It will be the thesis of this book that disagreements of this
kind — fundamental, doctrinal disagreements which seem to
admit of no solution — are due not to stupidity or stubbornness,
not even to an unscientific attitude towards the problems in-
volved, but to an unscientific attitude towards language itself.
In fact, a number of apparently insoluble problems which face
us in our personal Uves, in our society, and in our politics —
and it must be remembered that these problems are formu-
lated in words — may prove to be not insoluble at all when
viewed through a clearer knowledge of the workings of lan-
guage. It will be the purpose of this book, therefore, not only
to acquaint the reader with some elementary facts about lan-
guage such as are revealed by modern linguistics, anthro-
pology, psychology, philosophy, literary criticism, and other
branches of learning, but also to change his very attitude
towards language.

Such a change of attitude, it is believed, will, first of all,
make him a more understanding reader and Ustcner than he
was before. Secondly, it should increase the fruitfulness of
whatever conversation and discussion he enters into, because,

A STORY WITH A MORAL 9

depending on our unconscious attitudes towards the words
we hear and utter, we may use them either as weapons with
which to start arguments and verbal free-for-alls or as instru-
ments with which to increase our wisdom, our sense of
fellowship with other human beings, and our enjoyment of
hfe.

P.S. Those who have concluded that the point of the story
is that the Social Worker and the Advertising Man were
"only arguing about different names for the same thing," are
asked to reread the story and explain what they mean by (i)
"only," and (2) "the same thing."

THE IMPORTANCE OF
LANGUAGE

One cannot but wonder at this constantly recur-
ring phrase "getting something for nothing" as if
it were the peculiar and perverse ambition of dis-
turbers of society. Except for our animal outfit,
practically all we have is handed to us gratis. Can
the most complacent reactionary flatter himself
that he invented the art of writing or the printing
press, or discovered his religious, economic, and
moral convictions, or any of the devices which
supply him with meat and raiment or any of the
sources of such pleasure as he may derive from
literature or the fine arts? In short, civilization is
little else than getting something for nothing.

JAMES HARVEY ROBINSON

CO-OPERATION

WHEN someone shouts at you, "Look out!" and you
duck just in time to avoid being hit by a thrown ball,
you owe your escape from injury to the fundamental co-
operative act by which most o£ the higher animals survive:
namely, communication by means of noises. You did not see
the ball coming; nevertheless, someone did see it, and he
made certain noises to communicate his alarm to you. In
other words, although your nervous system did not record
the danger, you were unharmed because another nervous sys-
tem did record it. You had, for the time being, the advantage
of an extra nervous system in addition to your own.

THE IMPORTANCE OF LANGUAGE II

Indeed, most of the time when we are listening to the noises
people make or looking at the black marks on paper that
stand for such noises, we are drawing upon the experiences
of the nervous systems of others in order to make up what
our own nervous systems have missed. Now obviously the
more an individual can make use of the nervous systems of
others to supplement his own, the easier it is for him to sur-
vive. And, of course, the more individuals there are in a group
accustomed to co-operating by making helpful noises at each
other, the better it is for all — within the limits, naturally, of
the group's talents for organization. Birds and animals con-
gregate with their own kind and make noises when they find
food or become alarmed. In fact, gregariousness as an aid to
self-defense and survival is forced upon animals as well as
upon men by the necessity of uniting nervous systems even
more than by the necessity of uniting physical strength. So-
cieties, both animal and human, might almost be regarded as
huge co-operative nervous systems.

/ While animals use only a few limited cries, however,
humian beings use extremely complicated systems of sputter-
ing, hissing, gurgling, clucking, and cooing noises called lan-
guage, with which they express and report what goes on in
their nervous systems. Language is, in addition to being more
complicated, immeasurably more flexible than the animal cries
from which it was developed — so flexible indeed that it can
be used not only to report the tremendous variety of things
that go on in the human nervous system, but to report those
reports. That is, when an animal yelps, he may cause a second
animal to yelp in imitation or in alarm, but the second yelp
is not about the first yelp. But when a man says, "I see a
river," a second man can say, "He says he sees a river" —
which is a statement about a statement. About this statement-
about-a-statement further statements can be made — and about

12 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

those, still more. Language, in short, can be about language.
This is a fundamental way in which human noise-making
systems differ from the cries of animals.

THE POOLING OF KNOWLEDGE

In addition to having developed language, man has also de-
veloped means of making, on clay tablets, bits of wood or
stone, skins of animals, and paper, more or less permanent
marks and scratches which stand for language. These marks
enable him to communicate with people who are beyond the
reach of his voice, both in space and in time. There is a long
course of evolution from the marked trees that indicated
Indian trails to the metropolitan daily newspaper, but they
have this in common: they pass on what one individual has
known to other individuals, for their convenience or, in the
broadest sense, instruction. The Indians are dead, but many
of their trails are still marked and can be followed to this
day. Archimedes is dead, but we still have his reports about
what he observed in his experiments in physics. Keats is dead,
but he can still tell us how he felt on first reading Chapman's
Homer. From our newspapers we learn with great rapidity,
as the result of steamship, railway, telegraph, and radio, facts
about the world we live in. From books and magazines we
learn how hundreds of people whom we shall never be able
to see have felt and thought. All this information is useful to
us at one time or another in the solution of our own problems.
/A human being, then, is never dependent on his own expe-
rience alone for his information. Even in a primitive culture
he can make use of the experience of his neighbors, friends,
and relatives, which they communicate to him by means of
language. Therefore, instead of remaining helpless because of
the limitations of his own experience and knowledge, instead
of having to rediscover what others have already discovered.

THE IMPORTANCE OF LANGUAGE 13

instead of exploring the false trails they explored and repeat-
ing their errors, he can go on from where they left off.
Language, that is to say, makes progress possible.

Indeed, most of what we call the human characteristics of
our species are expressed and developed through our ability
to co-operate by means of our systems of making meaningful
noises and meaningful scratches on paper.' Even people who
belong to backward cultures in which writing has not been
invented are able to exchange information and to hand down
from generation to generation considerable stores of tradi-
tional knowledge. There seems, however, to be a limit both
to the trustworthiness and to the amount of knowledge that
can be transmitted orally. But when writing is invented, a
tremendous step forward is taken. The accuracy of reports
can be checked and rechecked by successive generations of
observers. The amount of knowledge accumulated ceases to
be limited by people's ability to remember what has been told
them. The result is that in any literate culture of a few
centuries' standing, human beings accumulate vast stores of
knowledge — far more than any individual in that culture can
read in his lifetime, let alone remember. These stores of
knowledge, which are being added to constantly, are made
widely available to all who want them through such mechani-
cal processes as printing and through such distributive agen-
cies as the book trade, the newspaper and magazine trade,
and hbrary systems. The result is that all of us who can read
any of the major European or Asiatic languages are poten-
tially in touch with the intellectual resources of centuries of
human endeavor in all parts of the civilized world.

A physician, for example, who does not know how to treat
a patient suffering from a rare disease can look up the disease
in a medical index, which may send him in turn to medical
journals. There he may find records of similar cases as re-
ported and described by a physician in Rotterdam, Holland,

14 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

in 1873, by another physician in Bangkok, Siam, in 1909, and
by still other physicians in Kansas City in 1924, With such
records before him, he can better handle his own case. Again,
if a person is worried about ethics, he is not dependent merely
upon the pastor of the Elm Street Baptist Church, but he may
go to Confucius, Aristotle, Jesus, Spinoza, and many others
whose reflections on ethical problems are on record. If one
is worried about love, he can get advice not only from his
mother or best friend, but from Sappho, Ovid, Propertius,
Shakespeare, Havelock Ellis, or any of a thousand others who
knew something about it and wrote down what they knew.
.Language, that is to say, is the indispensable mechanism of
human life — of life such as ours that is molded, guided, en-
riched, and made possible by the accumulation of the past
experience of members of our species.^ Dogs and cats and
chimpanzees do not, so far as we can tell, increase their wis-
dom, their information, or their control over their environ-
ment from one generation to the next. But human beings doi
\The cultural accomplishments of the ages, the invention of
cooking, of weapons, of writing, of printing, of methods of
building, of games and amusements, of means of transporta-
tion, and the discoveries of all the arts and sciences, come to
us as free gifts from the dead. These gifts, which none of us
has done anything to earn, offer us not only the opportunity
for a richer life than any of our forebears enjoyed, but also
the opportunity to add to the sum total of human achieve-
ment by our own contributions, however small.

■To be able to read and write, therefore, is to learn to profit
by and to take part in the greatest of human achievements —
that which makes all other human achievements possible —
namely, the pooling of our experience in great co-operative
stores of knowledge, available (except where special privilege,
censorship, or suppression stand in the way) to all. From the

THE IMPORTANCE OF LANGUAGE IJ

warning cry of the savage to the latest scientific monograph or
radio news flash, (Janguage is social. Cultural and intellectual
co-operation is, or should be, the great principle of human life. "•

THE WORLDS WE LIVE IN:
MAP AND TERRITORY

There is a sense in which we all live in two worlds. First,
we live in the world of the happenings about us which we
know at first hand. But this is an extremely small world, con-
sisting only of that continuum of the things that we have
actually seen, felt, or heard — the flow of events constantly
passing before our senses. As far as this world of personal
experience is concerned, Africa, South America, Asia, Wash-
ington, New York, or Los Angeles do not exist if we have
never been to these places. President Roosevelt is only a name
if we have never seen him. When we ask ourselves how much
we know at first hand, we discover that we know very little
indeed.

Most of our knowledge, acquired from parents, friends,
schools, newspapers, books, conversation, speeches, and radio,
is received verbally. All of our knowledge of history, for
example, comes to us only in words. The only proof we have
that the Battle of Waterloo ever took place is that we have
had reports to that effect. These reports are not given us by
people who saw it happen, but are based on other reports:
reports of reports of reports, and so on, that go back ulti-
mately to the first-hand reports given by the people who did
see it happening. It is through reports, then, and through
reports of reports, that we receive most of our knowledge:
about government, about what is happening in China, about
what picture is showing at the downtown theater — in fact,
about anything which we do not know through direct experi-
ence.

l6 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

Let us call this world that comes to us through words the
uerbal world, as opposed to the world we know or are capa-
ble of knowing through our own experience, which we shall
call the extensional world. The reason for the choice of the
word "extensional" will become clear later. The human being,
like any other creature, begins to make his acquaintance with
the extensional world from infancy. Unlike other creatures,
however, he begins to receive, as soon as he can learn to
understand, reports, reports of reports, reports of reports of
reports, and so on. In addition, he receives inferences made
from reports, inferences made from other inferences, and so
on. By the time a child is a few years old, has gone to school
and to Sunday school, and has made a few friends, he has
accumulated a considerable amount of second- and third-hand
information about morals, geography, history, nature, people,
games — all of which information together constitutes his
verbal world.

Now this verbal world ought to stand in relation to the
extensional world zs 2i map does to the territory it is supposed
to represent. If the child grows to adulthood with a verbal
world in his head which corresponds fairly closely to the
extensional world that he finds around him in his widening
experience, he is in relatively small danger of being shocked
or hurt by what he finds, because his verbal world has told
him what, more or less, to expect. He is prepared for life.
If, however, he grows up with a false map in his head — that
is, with a head crammed with false knowledge and supersti-
tion— he will constantly be running into trouble, wasting his
efforts, and acting like a fool. He will not be adjusted to the
world as it is; he may, if the lack of adjustment is serious,
end up in an insane asylum.

Some of the follies we commit because of false maps in our
heads are so commonplace that we do not even think of them
as remarkable. There are those who protect themselves from

THE IMPORTANCE OF LANGUAGE 17

accidents by carrying a rabbit's foot in the pocket. Some
refuse to sleep on the thirteenth floor of hotels — this is so
common that most big hotels, even in the capitals of our
scientific culture, skip "13" in numbering their floors. Some
plan their lives on the basis of astrological predictions. Some
play fifty-to-one shots on the basis of dream books. Some
hope to make their teeth whiter by changing their brand of
tooth paste. All such people are living in verbal worlds that
bear httle, if any, resemblance to the extensional world.

Now, no matter how beautiful a map may be, it is useless
to a traveler unless it accurately shows the relationship of
places to each other, the structure of the territory. If we draw,
for example, a big dent in the outline of a lake for, let us
say, artistic reasons, the map is worthless. But if we are just
drawing maps for fun without paying any attention to the
structure of the region, there is nothing in the world to pre-
vent us from putting in all the extra curlicues and twists we
want in the lakes, rivers, and roads. No harm will be done
unless someone tries to plan a trip by such a map. Similarly,
by means of imaginary or false reports, or by false inferences
from good reports, or by mere rhetorical exercises, we can
manufacture at will, with language, "maps" which have no
reference to the extensional world. Here again no harm will
be done unless someone makes the mistake of regarding such
"maps" as representing real "territories."

We all inherit a great deal of useless knowledge, and a
great deal of misinformation and error, so that there is always
a portion of what we have been told that must be discarded.
But the cultural heritage of our civilization that is trans-
mitted to us — our socially pooled knowledge, both scientific
and humane — has been valued principally because we have
believed that it gives us accurate maps of experience. The
analogy of verbal worlds to maps is an important one and

l8 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

will be referred to frequently throughout this book. It should
be noticed at this point, however, that there_ax:e_t_wp ways of
getting false maps of the world into our heads : first, by having
them given to us; second, by making them up for ourselves
by misreading the true maps given to us.

SYMBOLS

7 find it difficult to believe that tuords have no
meaning in themselves, hard as I try. Habits of a
lifetime are not lightly thrown aside.

STUART CHASE

SIGNAL AND SYMBOL REACTION

ANIMALS struggle with each other for food or for leader-
JLJL ship, but they do not, like human beings, struggle with
each other for things that stand for food or leadership: such
things as our paper symbols of wealth (money, bonds, titles),
badges of rank to wear on our clothes, or low-number license-
plates, supposed by some people to stand for social precedence.
For animals the relationship in which one thing stands for
something else does not appear to exist except in very rudi-
mentary form. For example, a chimpanzee can be taught to
drive a car, but there is one thing wrong with its driving: its
reactions are such that if a red light shows when it is halfway
across a street, it will stop in the middle of the crossing,
while if a green light shows while another car is stalled in its
path, it will go ahead regardless of consequences. In other
words, so far as a chimpanzee is concerned, the red light
can hardly be said to stand for stop; it is stop.

Let us then introduce two terms to represent this distinc-
tion between the "red light is stop" relationship, which the
chimpanzee understands, and the "red light stands for stop"
relationship, which the human being understands. To the
chimpanzee, the red light is, we shall say, a signal, and we
shall term its reaction a signal reaction; that is, a complete

20 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

and invariable reaction which occurs whether or not the con-
ditions warrant such a reaction. To the human being, on the
other hand, the red Ught is, in our terminology, a symbol,
and we shall term his reaction a symbol reaction; that is, a
delayed reaction, conditional upon the circumstances. In other
words, the nervous system capable only o£ signal reactions
identifies the signal with the thing for which the signal
stands; the human nervous system, however, working under
normal conditions, understands no necessary connection be-
tween the symbol and the thing for which the symbol stands.
Human beings do not automatically jump up in the expecta-
tion of being fed whenever they hear an icebox door slam.

THE SYMBOLIC PROCESS

Human beings, because they can understand certain things
jto stand for other things, have been able to develop what we
1 shall term the symbolic process. Whenever two or more hu-
man beings can communicate with each other, they can, by
agreement, make anything stand for anything. Feathers worn
on the head can be made to stand for tribal chieftainship;
cowrie shells or rings of brass or pieces of paper can stand
for wealth; crossed sticks can stand for a set of religious
beliefs; buttons, elks' teeth, ribbons, special styles of orna-
mental haircutting or tattooing, can stand for social affilia-
tions. The symbolic process permeates human life at the most
savage as well as at the most civilized levels. Warriors, medi-
cine men, policemen, doormen, telegraph boys, cardinals, and
kings wear costumes that symbolize their occupations. Savages
collect scalps, college students collect dance programs and
membership keys in honorary societies, to symbolize victories
in their respective fields. There are very few things that men
do or want to do, possess or want to possess, that have not,

SYMBOLS 21

in addition to their mechanical or biological value, a symbolic
value.

All fashionable clothes, as Thorstein Veblen has pointed
out in his Theory of the Leisure Class, arc highly symbolic:
materials, cut, and ornament are dictated only to a slight de-
gree by considerations of warmth, comfort, or practicability.
The more we dress up in fine clothes, the more do we restrict
our freedom of action. But by means of delicate embroideries,
easily soiled fabrics, starched shirts, high heels, long and
pointed fingernails, and other such sacrifices of comfort, the
wealthy classes manage to symbolize the fact that they don't
have to work for a hving. The not so wealthy, on the other
hand, by imitating these symbols of wealth, symbolize their
conviction that, even if they do work for a living, they are
just as good as anybody else. Again, we select our furniture
to serve as visible symbols of our taste, wealth, and social
position; we trade in perfectly good cars for later models, not
always to get better transportation, but to give evidence to
the community that we can afford such luxuries; we often
choose our residential localities on the basis of a feeling that
it "looks well" to have a "good address"; we like to put ex-
pensive food on our tables, not always because it tastes better
than cheap food, but because it tells our guests that we Uke
them, or, just as often, because it tells them that we are well
fixed financially.

Such compHcated and apparently unnecessary behavior
leads philosophers, both amateur and professional, to ask over
and over again, "Why can't human beings Hve simply and
naturally?" Perhaps, unconsciously, they would like to escape
the complexity of human life for the relative simplicity of
such lives as dogs and cats lead. But the symbolic process,
which makes possible the absurdities of human conduct, also
makes possible language and therefore all the human achieve-

22 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

merits dependent upon language. The fact that more things
can go wrong with motorcars than with wheelbarrows is no
reason for going back to wheelbarrows. Similarly, the fact
that the symboHc process makes complicated follies possible
is no reason for wanting to return to a caVand-dog existence.

LANGUAGE AS SYMBOLISM

Of all forms of symbolism, language is the most highly de-
veloped, most subtle, and most compUcated. It has been
pointed out that human beings, by agreement, can make any-
thing stand for anything. Now, human beings have agreed,
in the course of centuries of mutual dependency, to let the
various noises that they can produce with their lungs, throats,
tongues, teeth, and lips systematically stand for specified hap-
penings in their nervous systems. We call that system -oi
agreements language. For example, we who speak English
have been so trained that when our nervous systems register
the presence of a certain kind of animal, we may make the
following noise: "There's a cat." Anyone hearing us would
expect to find that by looking in the same direction, he would
experience a similar event in his nervous system — one that
would have led him to make an almost identical noise. Again,
we have been so trained that when we are conscious of want-
ing food, we make the noise, "I'm hungry."

There is, as has been said, no necessary connection between
the symbol and that which is symbolized. Just as men can
wear yachting costumes without ever having been near a
yacht, so they can make the noise, "I'm hungry," without
being hungry. Furthermore, just as social rank can be sym-
bolized by feathers in the hair, by tattooing on the breast, by
gold ornaments on the watch chain, by a thousand different
devices according to the culture we live in, so the fact of being

SYMBOLS 23

hungry can be symbolized by a thousand different noises
according to the culture we live in: "J'ai faim," or "Es hungert
mich," or "Ho appetito," or "Hara ga hetta," and so on.

LINGUISTIC NAIVETE

However obvious these facts may appear at first glance,
they are actually not so obvious as they seem except when we
take special pains to think about the subject. Symbols and
things symbolized are independent of each other; neverthe-
less, all of us have a way of feeHng as if, and sometimes acting
as if, there were necessary connections. For example, there is
the vague sense that we all have that foreign languages are
inherently absurd. Foreigners have "funny names" for things:
why can't they call things by their "right names"? This feel-
ing exhibits itself most strongly in those American and Eng-
lish tourists who seem to believe that they can make the
natives of any country understand Enghsh if they shout it
at them loud enough. They feel, that is, that the symbol
must necessarily call to mind the thing symbolized.

Anthropologists report similar attitudes among primitive
peoples. In talking with natives, they frequently come across
unfamiliar words in the native language. When they interrupt
the conversation to ask, "Guglu? What is a guglu?" the
natives laugh, as if to say, "Imagine not knowing what a
guglu is! What amazingly silly people!" When an answer
is insisted upon, they explain, when they can get over laugh-
ing, "Why, a guglu is a guglu, of course!" Very small chil-
dren think in this respect the way primitive people do; often
when policemen say to a whimpering lost child, "All right,
little girl, we'll find your mother for you. Who is your
mother? What's your mother's name?" the child can only
bawl, "My muvver is mummy. I want mummy!" This leaves

24 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

the police, as they say in murder mysteries, baffled. Again,
there is the Httle boy who is reported to have said, "Pigs are
called pigs because they are such dirty animals."

Similar naivete regarding the symbolic process is illustrated
by an incident in the adventures of a theatrical troupe playing
melodramas to audiences in the western ranching country.
One night, at a particularly tense moment in the play, when
the villain seemed to have the hero and the heroine in his
power, an overexcited cowpuncher in the audience suddenly
rose from his seat and shot the villain. The cowpuncher of
this story, however, is no more ridiculous than those thou-
sands of people today, many of them adults, who write fan
letters to a ventriloquist's dummy, or those goodhearted but
impressionable people who send presents to the broadcasting
station when two characters in a radio serial get married, or
those astonishing patriots who rushed to recruiting offices to
help defend the nation when the United States was "invaded"
by an "army from Mars."

These, however, are only the more striking examples of
primitive and infantile attitudes towards symbols. There
would be httle point in mentioning them if we were uni-
formly and permanently aware of the independence of sym-
bols from things symbolized. But we are not. Most of us re-
tain many habits of evaluation ("thinking habits") more
, appropriate to life in the jungle than to life in modern civili-
zation. Moreover, all of us are capable of reverting to them,
especially when we are overexcited or when subjects about
which we have special prejudices are mentioned. Worst of
all, various people who have easy access to such instruments
of public communication as the press, the radio, the lecture
platform, and the pulpit actively encourage primitive and
infantile attitudes towards symbols. Political and journalistic
charlatans, advertisers of worthless or overpriced goods, and

SYMBOLS 25

promoters of religious bigotry stand to profit either in terms
of money or power or both, if the majority of people can be
kept thinking like savages or children.

THE WORD-DELUGE WE LIVE IN

The interpretation of words is a never-ending task for any
citizen in modern society. We now have, as the result of
modern means of communication, hundreds of thousands of
words flung at us daily. We are constantly being talked at,
by teachers, preachers, salesmen, public officials, and moving-
picture sound tracks. The cries of the hawkers of soft drinks,
soap chips, and laxatives pursue us into our very homes,
thanks to the radio — and in some houses the radio is never
turned off from morning to night. Daily the newsboy brings
us, in large cities, from thirty to fifty enormous pages of
print, and almost three times that amount on Sundays. The
mailman brings magazines and direct-mail advertising. We
go out and get more words at bookstores and libraries. Bill-
boards confront us on the highways, and we even take porta-
ble radios with us to the seashore. Words fill our lives.

This word-deluge in which we live is by no means entirely
to be regretted. It is to be expected that we should become
more dependent on mutual intercommunications as civihza-
tion advances. But, with words being flung about as heed-
lessly of social consequences as they now are, it is obvious
that if we approach them with primitive habits of evaluation,
or even with a tendency to revert occasionally to primitive
habits of evaluation, we cannot do otherwise than run into
error, confusion, and tragedy.

26 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

WHY IS THE WORLD A MESS?
ONETHEORY

But, the reader may say, surely educated people don't think
like savages! Unfortunately they do — some about one subject,
some about another. The educated are frequently quite as
naive about language as the uneducated, although the ways in
which they exhibit their naivete may be less easily discernible.
Indeed, many are worse off than the uneducated, because
while the uneducated often realize their own limitations, the
educated are in a position to refuse to admit their ignorance
and conceal their limitations from themselves by their skill at
word-juggling. After all, education as it is still understood
in many circles is principally a matter of learning facility in
the manipulation of words.

Such training in word-manipulation cannot but lead to an
unconscious assumption that if any statement sounds true, it
must be true — or, if not true, at least passable. This assump-
tion (always unconscious) leads even learned men to make
beautiful "maps" of "territories" that do not exist — without
ever suspecting their nonexistence. Indeed, it can safely be
said that whenever people are more attached to their verbal
"maps" than to the factual "territories" (that is, whenever they
are so attached to pet theories that they cannot give them up
in the face of facts to the contrary), they are exhibiting serious
linguistic naivete. Some educated and extremely intelligent
people are so attached to the verbal "maps" they have created
that, when they can find no territories in the known world
to correspond to them, they create "supersensory" realms of
"transcendental reality," so that they will not have to admit
the uselessness of their maps.^ Such people are often in a posi-
tion to impose their notions on others, in beautifully written

1 See Eric Temple Bell, The Search for Truth; also Thurman W. Arnold,
The Folklore of Capitalism.

SYMBOLS 27

books and in eloquent lectures, and they thus spread the re-
sults of linguistic naivete wherever their influence can reach.

As this is being v^^ritten, the world is becoming daily a worse
madhouse of murder, hatred, and destruction. It would seem
that the almost miraculous efficiency achieved by modern
instruments of communication should enable nations to
understand each other better and co-operate more fully. But,
as we know too well, the opposite has been the case; the
better the communications, the bloodier the quarrels.

Linguistic naivete — our tendency to think like savages about
practically all subjects other than the purely technological —
is not a factor to be ignored in trying to account for the mess
civilization is in. By using the radio and the newspaper as
instruments for the promotion of political, commercial, and
sectarian balderdash, rather than as instruments of public
enlightenment, we seem to have increased the infectiousness
of savagery of thought. Men react to meaningless noises, maps
of nonexistent territories, as if they stood for actualities, and
never suspect that there is anything wrong with the process.
Political leaders hypnotize themselves with the babble of their
own voices and use words in a way that shows not the slight-
est concern with the fact that if language, the basic instru-
ment of man's humanity, finally becomes as meaningless as
they would make it, co-operation will not be able to continue,
and society itself will fall apart.

But to the extent that we too think like savages and babble
Uke idiots, we all share the guilt for the mess in which human
society finds itself. To cure these evils, we must first go to|
work on ourselves. An important beginning step is to under-
stand how language works, what we are doing when we
open these irresponsible mouths of ours, and what it is that
happens, or should happen, when we listen or read.

28 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

APPLICATIONS

The following hobby is suggested for those who wish to
follow the argument of this book. In a scrapbook or, perhaps
better, on 5x7 fihng cards, start a collection of quotations,
newspaper clippings, editorials, anecdotes, bits of overheard
conversation, advertising slogans, etc., that illustrate in one
way or another linguistic naivete. The ensuing chapters of this
book will suggest many different kinds of linguistic naivete
and confusion to look for, and the methods for classifying the
examples found will also be suggested. The simplest way to
start will be to look for those instances in which people seem
to think that there are necessary connections between symbols
and things symbolized — between words and what words stand
for. Innumerable examples can be found in books on cultural
anthropology, especially in those sections dealing with word-
magic. After a few such examples are chosen and studied,
the reader will be able to recognize readily similar patterns of
thought in his contemporaries and friends. Here are a few
items with which such a collection might be begun:

1 I. "The Malagasy soldier must eschew kidneys, because in the
Malagasy language the word for kidney is the same as that for
'shot'; so shot he would certainly be if he ate a kidney." — j. g.
FRAZER, The Golden Bough (one-volume abridged edition), p. 22.
2. [A child is being questioned.] "Could the sun have been
called 'moon' and the moon 'sun'? — No. — Why not? — Because
the sun shines brighter than the moon. . . . But if everyone had
called the sun 'moon,' and the moon 'sun,' would we have known
it was wrong? — Yes, because the sun is always bigger, it always
stays lil{e it is and so does the moon. — Yes, but the sun isn't
changed, only its name. Could it have been called . . . etc.? —
No.'. . . Because the moon rises in the evening, and the sun in
the day." — piaget, The Child's Conception of the World, pp.
81-82.

SYMBOLS 29

3. The City Council of Cambridge, Massachusetts, unanimously
passed a resolution (December, 1939) making it illegal "to pos-
sess, harbor, sequester, introduce or transport, within the city
limits, any book, map, magazine, newspaper, pamphlet, handbill
or circular containing the words Lenin or Leningrad."
^ 4. The gates of the 1933 Century of Progress Exposition at
Chicago were opened, through the use of the photoelectric cell,
by the light of the star Arcturus. It is reported that a woman, on
being told of this, remarked, "Isn't it wonderful how those scien-
tists /{now the names of all those stars!"

5. "State Senator John McNaboe of New York bitterly opposed
a bill for the control of syphilis in May, 1937, because 'the inno-
cence of children might be corrupted by a widespread use of the
term, . . . This particular word creates a shudder in every decent
woman and decent man.' " — stuart chase. The Tyranny of
Words, p. 63.

6. A picture in the magazine Life (October 28, 1940) shows
the backs of a sailor's hands, with the letters "h-o-l-d f-a-s-t"
tattooed on the fingers. The caption explains, "This tattoo was
supposed to keep sailors from falling off yardarm."

REPORTS

Vague and insignificant forms of speech, and abuse
of language, have so long passed for mysteries of
science; and hard or misapplied words with little
or no meaning have, by prescription, such a right
to be mistaken for deep learning and height of
speculation, that it will not be easy to persuade
either those luho speak or those who hear them,
that they are but the covers of ignorance and
hindrance of true knowledge.

JOHN LOCKE

FOR the purposes o£ the interchange of information, the
basic symbolic act is the report of what we have seen,
heard, or felt: "There is a ditch on each side of the road."
"You can get those at Smith's hardware store for I2.75."
"There aren't any fish on that side of the lake, but there are
on this side." Then there are reports of reports: "The longest
waterfall in the world is Victoria Falls in Rhodesia." "The
Battle of Hastings took place in 1066." "The papers say that
there was a big smash-up on Highway 41 near Evansville."
Reports adhere to the following rules: first, they are capable
of verification; secondly, they exclude, so far as possible,
judgments, inferences, and the use of "loaded" words.

VERIFI ABILITY

Reports are verifiable. We may not always be able to verify
them ourselves, since we cannot track down the evidence for
every piece of history we know, nor can we all go to Evans-

REPORTS 31

ville to see the remains of the smash-up before they are cleared
away. But if we are roughly agreed on the names of things,
on what constitutes a "foot," "yard," "bushel," and so on, and
on how to measure time, there is relatively little danger of our
misunderstanding each other. Even in a world such as we
have today, in which everybody seems to be fighting every-
body else, we still to a surprising degree trust each other's
reports. We ask directions of total strangers when we are
traveling. We follow directions on road signs without being
suspicious of the people who put the signs up. We read books
of information about science, mathematics, automotive engi-
neering, travel, geography, the history of costume, and other
such factual matters, and we usually assume that the author
is doing his best to tell us as truly as he can what he knows.
And we are safe in so assuming most of the time. With the
emphasis that is being given today to the discussion of biased
newspapers, propagandists, and the general untrustworthiness
of many of the communications we receive, we are likely to
forget that we still have an enormous amount of reliable in-
formation available and that dehberate misinformation, ex-
cept in warfare, still is more the exception than the rule.
The desire for self-preservation that compelled men to evolve
means for the exchange of information also compels them to
regard the giving of false information as profoundly repre-
hensible.

At its highest development, the language of reports is
known as science. By "highest development" we mean great-
est general usefulness. Presbyterian and CathoUc, working-
man and capitalist, German and Englishman, agree on
the meanings of such symbols as 2 X 2 = ^, 100° C, HNO3,
5;j5 A.M., jg^o a.d., 5000 r.p.m., 1000 \ilowatts, pulex irritans,
and so on. But how, it may be asked, can there be agreement
even about this much among people who are at each other's
throats about practically everything else.? The answer is that

32 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

circumstances compel them to agree, whether they wish to or
not. If, for example, there were a dozen different reUgious
sects in the United States, each insisting on its own way of
naming the time of the day and the days of the year, the
mere necessity of having a dozen different calendars, a dozen
different kinds of watches, and a dozen sets of schedules for
business hours, trains, and radio programs, to say nothing of
the effort that would be required for translating terms from
one nomenclature to another, would make life as we know it
impossible.

The language of reports, then, including the more accurate
reports of science, is "map" language, and because it gives us
reasonably accurate representations of the "territory" it en-
ables us to get work done. Such language may often be what
is commonly termed "dull" or "uninteresting" reading; one
does not usually read logarithmic tables or telephone directo-
ries for entertainment. But we could not get along without
it. There are numberless occasions in the talking and writing
we do in everyday life that require that we state things in
such a way that everybody will agree with our formulation.

SOME WRITING EXERCISES:

THE EXCLUSION OF JUDGMENTS

The reader will find that practice in writing reports is a
quick means of increasing his linguistic awareness. It is an
excellent exercise, one which will constantly provide him with
his own examples of the principles of language and interpre-
tation under discussion. The reports should be about first-
hand experience — scenes the reader has witnessed himself,
meetings and social events he has taken part in, people he
knows well. They should be of such a nature that they can
be verified and agreed upon.

This is not a simple task.A report must exclude all expres-

REPORTS 33

sions of the writer's approval or disapproval of the occur-
rences, persons, or objects he is describing. For example, a
report cannot say, "It was a wonderful car," but must say
something like this: "It has been driven 50,000 miles and has
never required any repairs." Again, statements like "Jack lied
to us" must be suppressed in favor of the more verifiable
statement, "Jack told us he didn't have the keys to his car
with him. However, when he pulled a handkerchief out of his
pocket a few minutes later, the keys fell out." Also, a report
may not say, "The senator was stubborn, defiant, and un-
co-operative," or "The senator courageously stood by his prin-
ciples"; it must say instead, "The senator's vote was the only
one against the bill." Most people regard statements like the
following as statements of fact: "He is a thief." "He is a bad
boy." These again must be excluded in favor of statements
of the more verifiable kind: "He was convicted of theft and
served two years at Waupun." "His mother, his father, and
most of the neighbors say he is a bad boy," After all, to say
of a man that he is a "thief" is to say in effect, "He has stolen
and will steal again" — which is more a prediction than a re-
port. Even to say, "He has stolen," is to pass a judgment on "^
an act about which there may be difference of opinion among \
different observers. But to say that he was "convicted of
theft" is to make a statement capable of being agreed upon
through verification in court and prison records.

Scientific verifiability rests upon the external observation of ^'
facts, not upon the heaping up of judgments. If one person
says, "Peter is a deadbeat," and another says, "I think so
too," the statement has not been verified. In court cases, con-
siderable trouble is sometimes caused by witnesses who can-
not distinguish their judgments from the facts upon which
those judgments are based. Cross-examinations under these
circumstances go something like this:

34 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

Witness. That dirty double-crosser Jacobs ratted on me!

Defense Attorney. Your honor, I object.

Judge. Objection sustained. [Witness's remark is stricken from
the record.] Now, try to tell the court exactly what happened.

Witness. He double-crossed me, the dirty, lying rat!

Defense Attorney. Your honor, I object!

Judge. Objection sustained. [Witness's remark is again stricken
from the record.] Will the witness try to stick to the facts.

Witness. But I'm telling you the facts, your honor. He did
double-cross me.

This can continue indefinitely unless the cross-examiner exer-
cises some ingenuity in order to get at the facts behind the
judgment. To the witness it is a "fact" that he was "double-
crossed." Often hours of patient questioning are required
before the factual bases of the judgment are revealed.

THE EXCLUSION OF INFERENCES

Another requirement of reports is that they must make no
guesses as to what is going on in other people's minds. When
we say, "He was angry," we are not reporting, we are making
an inference from such observable facts as the following: "He
pounded his fist on the table; he swore; he threw the tele-
phone directory at his stenographer." In this particular exam-
ple, the inference appears to be fairly safe; nevertheless, it is
important to remember, especially for the purposes of train-
ing oneself, that it is an inference. Such expressions as "He
thought a lot of himself," "He was scared of girls," "She
always wants nothing but the best," should be avoided in
favor of the more verifiable "He showed evidences of annoy-
ance when people did not treat him politely," "He stammered
when he asked girls to dance with him," "She frequently de-
clared that she wanted nothing but the best."

REPORTS 35

THE EXCLUSION OF ''LOADED*' WORDS

In short, the process of reporting is the process of keeping
one's personal feehngs out. In order to do this, one must be
constantly on guard against "loaded" words that reveal or
arouse feelings. Instead of "sneaked in," one should say "en-
tered quietly"; instead of "politicians," "congressmen" or
"aldermen"; instead of "officeholder," "public official"; instead
of "tramp," "homeless unemployed"; instead of "Chinaman,"
"Chinese"; instead of "dictatorial set-up," "centraHzed
authority"; instead of "crackpots," "holders of uncommon
views." A newspaper reporter, for example, is not permitted
to write, "A bunch of fools who are suckers enough to fall
for Senator Smith's ideas met last evening in that rickety
firetrap that disfigures the south edge of town." Instead he
says, "Between seventy-five and a hundred people were pres-
ent last evening to hear an address by Senator Smith at the
Evergreen Gardens near the South Side city Hmits."

second stage of the writing
exercise: slanting

In the course of writing reports of personal experiences, it
will be found that in spite of all endeavors to keep judgments
out, some will creep in. An account of a man, for example,
may go like this: "He had apparently not shaved for several
days, and his face and hands were covered with grime. His
shoes were torn, and his coat, which was several sizes too
small for him, was spotted with dried clay." Now, in spite
of the fact that no judgment has been stated, a very obvious
one is impUed. Let us contrast this with another description
of the same man. "Although his face was bearded and neg-
lected, his eyes were clear, and he looked straight ahead as

}6 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

he walked rapidly down the road. He looked very tall; per-
haps the fact that his coat was too small for him emphasized
that impression. He was carrying a book under his left arm,
and a small terrier ran at his heels." In this example, the im-
pression about the same man is considerably changed, simply
by the inclusion of new details and the subordination of un-
favorable ones. Even if explicit judgments are \ept out of
one's writing, implied judgments will get in.

How, then, can we ever give an impartial report? The
answer is, of course, that we cannot attain complete impar-
tiality while we use the language of everyday lif?. Even with
the very impersonal language of science, the task is some-
times difficult. Nevertheless, we can, by being aware of the
favorable or unfavorable feelings that certain words and facts
can arouse, attain enough impartiality for practical purposes.
Such awareness enables us to balance the implied favorable
and unfavorable judgments against each other. To learn to
do this, it is a good idea to write two essays at a time on the
same subject, both strict reports, to be read side by side: the'
first to contain facts and details likely to prejudice the reader
in favor of the subject, the second to contain those likely to
prejudice the reader against it. For example:

FOR AGAINST

He had white teeth. His teeth were uneven.

His eyes were blue, his hair He rarely looked people

blond and abundant. straight in the eye.

He had on a clean blue shirt. His shirt was frayed at the

He often helped his wife cuffs.
with the dishes. He rarely got through drying

His pastor spoke very highly dishes without breaking a few.
of him. His grocer said he was

always slow about paying his
bills.

REPORTS 37

SLANTING BOTH WAYS AT ONCE

This process of selecting details favorable or unfavorable
to the subject being described may be termed slanting. Slant-
ing gives no explicit judgments, but it differs from reporting
in that it deliberately makes certain judgments inescapable.
The writer striving for impartiality will, therefore, take care
to slant both for and against his subject, trying as conscien-
tiously as he can to keep the balance even. The next stage of
the exercise, then, should be to rewrite the parallel essays into
a single coherent essay in which details on both sides are in-
cluded.

His teeth were white, but uneven; his eyes were blue, his hair
blond and abundant. He did not often look people straight in the
eye. His shirt was slightly frayed at the cuffs, but it was clean.
He frequently helped his wife with the dishes, but he broke
many of them. Opinion about him in the community was divided.
His grocer said he was slow about paying his bills, but his pastor
spoke very highly of him.

This example is, of course, oversimplified and admittedly
not very graceful. But practice in writing such essays will
first of all help to prevent one from slipping unconsciously
from observable facts to judgments; that is, from "He was a
member of the Ku Klux Klan" to "the dirty scoundrel!"
Next, it will reveal how Uttle we really want to be impartial
anyway, especially about our best friends, our parents, our
alma mater, our own children, our country, the company we
work for, the product we sell, our competitor's product, or
anything else in which our interests are deeply involved.
Finally, we will discover that, even if we have no wish to be
impartial, we write more clearly, more forcefully, and more
convincingly by this process of sticking as close as possible to

38 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

observable facts. There will be less "hot air" and more sub-
stance.

HOW JUDGMENTS STOP THOUGHT

A judgment ("He is a fine boy," "It was a beautiful
service," "Baseball is a healthful sport," "She is an awful
bore") is a conclusion, summing up a large number of pre-
viously observed facts. The reader is probably familiar with
the fact that students, when called upon to write "themes,"
almost always have difficulty m writing papers of the required
length, because their ideas give out after a paragraph or two.
The reason for this is that those early paragraphs contain so
many such judgments that there is little left to be said. When
the conclusions are carefully excluded, however, and observed
facts are given instead, there is never any trouble about the
length of papers; in fact, they tend to become too long, since
inexperienced writers, when told to give facts, often give far
more than are necessary, because they lack discrimination be-
tween the important and the trivial. This, however, is better
than the literary constipation with which most students are
afflicted as soon as they get a writing assignment.

Still another consequence of judgments early in the course
of a written exercise — and this applies also to hasty judg-
ments in everyday thought — is the temporary blindness they
induce. When, for example, an essay starts with the words,
"He was a real Wall Street executive," or "She was a typical
cute little co-ed," if we continue writing at all, we must make
all our later statements consistent with those judgments. The
result is that all the individual characteristics of this particu-
lar "executive" or this particular "co-ed" are lost sight of en-
tirely; and the rest of the essay is likely to deal not with ob-
served facts, but with the writer's private notion (based on
previously read stories, movies, pictures, etc.) of what "Wall

REPORTS 39

Street executives" or "typical co-eds" look like. The premature
judgment, that is, often prevents us from seeing what is di-
rectly in front of us. Even if the writer feels sure at the be-
ginning of a written exercise that the man he is describing is
a "loafer" or that the scene he is describing is a "beautiful resi-
dential suburb," he will conscientiously keep such notions out
of his head, lest his vision be obstructed.

A few weeks of practice in writing reports, slanted reports,
and reports slanted both ways will improve powers of obser-
vation, as well as ability to recognize soundness of observa-
tion in the writings of others. A sharpened sense for the dis-
tinction between facts and judgments, facts and inferences,
will reduce susceptibility to the flurries of frenzied public
opinion which certain people find it to their interest to
arouse. Alarming judgments and inferences can be made to
appear inevitable by means of skillfully slanted reports. A
reader who is aware of the technique of slanting, however,
cannot be stampeded by such methods. He knows too well
that there may be other relevant facts which have been left
out. Who worries now about the "Twenty-one Days Left
to Save the American Way of Life" of the 1936 presidential
campaign? Who worries now about the "snooping into
private lives" and the "establishment of an American Gestapo"
that were supposed to result from the 1940 census? Yet peo-
ple worry about such things at the time.

APPLICATIONS

I. Here are a number of statements which the reader may
attempt to classify as judgments, inferences, or reports. Since
the distinctions are not always clear-cut, a one-word answer
will not ordinarily be adequate. If the reader finds himself
in disagreement with others as to the classification of some of
the statements, he is advised to remember the Social Worker

40 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

and the Advertising Man and not to argue. Note that we are
concerned here with the nature of the statements, not their
truth or falsity; for example, the statement, "Water freezes
at 10° Centigrade," is, although inaccurate, a report.

^ a. She goes to church only in order to show off her clothes.
^ b. A penny saved is a penny earned.
rr" c. Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

Is hung with bloom along the bough.

A. E. HOUSMAN

J d. In the old days, newspapers used to tell the truth.
jT e. The German-American Bund is a Nazi propaganda agency.
fZ.. f. Belgium has been called the Niobe of nations.
'r' g. "Italy's would-be invaders can't blitzkrieg through country
^ which is crisscrossed by a whole series of mountain ranges and

whose narrow passes and extremely few serpentine roads are
guarded by large and determined Greek forces."

Chicago Daily News.
J^ h. Senator Smith has for a long time secretly nursed presidential
ambitions,
i. Piping down the valleys wild,
Piping songs of pleasant glee,
On a cloud I saw a child,
And he laughing said to me:

"Pipe a song about a Lamb!"
So I piped with merry cheer.
"Piper, pipe that song again;"
So I piped: he wept to hear.

WILLIAM BLAKE

•^ j. "But the liberals needn't be feared if you understand them.
The thing to do is to keep constantly posted on what they are
up to and treat them as something that got on your shoe.
They are mostly noise, and an honest man has the advantage,
because truth and tolerance simply are not in them."

WESTBROOK PEGLER.

REPORTS 41

k. "And Adam lived an hundred and thirty years, and begat a
son in his own likeness, after his image; and called his name
Seth: And the days of Adam after he had begotten Seth were
eight hundred years: and he begat sons and daughters: And
all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty
years: and he died." — Genesis 5:3-5.

2. In addition to trying such exercises in report writing and
the exclusion of judgments and inferences as are suggested in
this chapter, it is suggested that the reader try writing (a) re-
ports heavily slanted against persons or events he li\es, and
(b) reports heavily slanted in favor of persons or events he
thoroughly dislikes. For example, the ardent Democrat might
show a Republican rally in a favorable light and a Democratic
rally in an unfavorable light; the ardent Republican might
reverse this procedure. This is a necessary preliminary to
"slanting both ways at once," which is obviously an impossi-
ble task for anyone who can see things only in one way. Inci-
dentally, the "Reporter at Large" department and the "Pro-
files" department of The New Yor\er often offer good exam-
ples of the report technique: explicit judgments are few, and
a real effort is made to give at least the appearance of "slant-
ing both ways at once."

CONTEXTS

Dictionary definitions frequently offer verbal sub-
stitutes for an unknown term which only conceal
a lack, of real understanding. Thus a person might
look up a foreign word and be quite satisfied with
the meaning "bullfinch" without the slightest
ability to identify or describe this bird. Under-
standing does not come through dealings with
words alone, but rather with the things for which
they stand. Dictionary definitions permit us to hide
from ourselves and others the extent of our igno-
rance.

H. R. HUSE

HOW DICTIONARIES ARE MADE

IT is an almost universal belief that every word has a "cor-
rect meaning," that we learn these meanings principally
from teachers and grammarians (except that most of the time
we don't bother to, so that we ordinarily speak "sloppy Eng-
lish"), and that dictionaries and grammars are the "supreme
authority" in matters of meaning and usage. Few people ask
by what authority the writers of dictionaries and grammars
say what they say. The docility with which most people bow
down to the dictionary is amazing, and the person who says,
"Well, the dictionary is wrong!" is looked upon with smiles
of pity and amusement which say plainly, "Poor fellow! He's
really quite sane otherwise."

Let us see how dictionaries are made and how the editors
arrive at definitions. What follows applies, incidentally, only
to those dictionary offices where first-hand, original research

CONTEXTS 43

goes on — not those in which editors simply copy existing dic-
tionaries. The task of writing a dictionary begins with the
reading of vast amounts of the hterature of the period or sub-
ject that it is intended to cover. As the editors read, they copy
on cards every interesting or rare word, every unusual or pe-
cuhar occurrence of a common word, a large number of
common words in their ordinary uses, and also the sentences
m tvhich each of these words appears, thus:

pail

The

dairy

pails

bring

home increase of
Keats, Endymion

I> 44-45

milk

That is to say, the context of each word is collected, along
with the word itself. For a really big job of dictionary writing,
such as the Oxford English Dictionary (usually bound in
about twenty-five volumes), millions of such cards are col-
lected, and the task of editing occupies decades. As the cards
are collected, they are alphabetized and sorted. When the
sorting is completed, there will be for each word anywhere
from two or three to several hundred illustrative quotations,
each on its card.

To define a word, then, the dictionary editor places before
him the stack of cards illustrating that word; each of the
cards represents an actual use of the word by a writer of some
literary or historical importance. He reads the cards carefully,
discards some, re-reads the rest, and divides up the stack ac-
cording to what he thinks are the several senses of the word.
Finally, he writes his definitions, following the hard-and-fast
rule that each definition must be based on what the quota-
tions in front of him reveal about the meaning of the word.
The editor cannot be influenced by what he thinks a given

44 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

word ought to mean. He must work according to the cards,
or not at all.

The writing of a dictionary, therefore, is not a task of
setting up authoritative statements about the "true meanings"
of words, but a task of recording, to the best of one's ability,
what various words have meant to authors in the distant or
immediate past. The writer of a dictionary is a historian, not
a law-giver. If, for example, we had been writing a dictionary
in 1890, or even as late as 1919, we could have said that the
word "broadcast" means "to scatter," seed and so on; but we
could not have decreed that from 1921 on, the commonest
meaning of the word should become "to disseminate audible
messages, etc., by wireless telephony." To regard the diction-
ary as an "authority," therefore, is to credit the dictionary
writer with gifts of prophecy which neither he nor anyone
else possesses. In choosing our words when we speak or write,
we can be guided by the historical record afforded us by the
dictionary, but we cannot be bound by it, because new situa-
tions, new experiences, new inventions, new feelings, are
always compelling us to give new uses to old words. Looking
under a "hood," we should ordinarily have found, five hun-
dred years ago, a monk; today, we find a motorcar engine.

VERBAL AND PHYSICAL CONTEXTS

The way in which the dictionary writer arrives at his defi-
nitioas is merely the systematization of the way in which we
all learn the meanings of words, beginning at infancy, and
continuing for the rest of our lives. Let us say that we have
never heard the word "oboe" before, and we overhear a con-
versation in which the following sentences occur:

He used to be the best oboe player in town. . . . Whenever
they came to that oboe part in the third movement, he used to

CONTEXTS 45

get very excited. ... I saw him one day at the music shop,
buying a new reed for his oboe. . , . He never Hked to play the
clarinet after he started playing the oboe. He said it wasn't so
much fun, because it was too easy.

Although the word may be unfamiliar, its meaning becomes
clear to us as we listen. After hearing the first sentence, we
know that an "oboe" is "played," so that it must be either a
game or a musical instrument. With the second sentence the
possibility of its being a game is eliminated. With each suc-
ceeding sentence the possibilities as to what an "oboe" may
be are narrowed down until we get a fairly clear idea of what
is meant. This is how we learn by verbal context.

But even independently of this, we learn by physical and
social context. Let us say that we are playing golf and that
we have hit the ball in a certain way with certain unfortu-
nate results, so that our companion says to us, "That's a bad
slice." He repeats this remark every time our ball fails to go
straight. If we are reasonably bright, we learn in a very short
time to say, when it happens again, "That's a bad slice." On
one occasion, however, our friend says to us, "That's not a
slice this time; that's a hool{." In this case we consider what
has happened, and we wonder what is different about the last
stroke from those previous. As soon as we make the distinc-
tion, we have added still another word to our vocabulary.
The result is that after nine holes of golf, we can use both
these words accurately — and perhaps several others as well,
such as "divot," "number-five iron," "approach shot," with-
out ever having been told what they mean. Indeed, we may
play golf for years without ever being able to give a dictionary
definition of "to shce": "To strike (the ball) so that the face
of the club draws inward across the face of the ball, causing
it to curve toward the right in flight (with a right-handed
player)" {Webster's New International Dictionary). But even
without being able to give such a definition, we should still

46 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

be able to use the word accurately whenever the occasion de-
manded.

We learn the meanings of practically all our words (which
are, it will be remembered, merely complicated noises), not
from dictionaries, not from definitions, but from hearing
these noises as they accompany actual situations in life and
learning to associate certain noises with certain situations.
Even as dogs learn to recognize "words," as for example by
hearing "biscuit" at the same time as an actual biscuit is held
before their noses, so do we all learn to interpret language by
being aware of the happenings that accompany the noises
people make at us — by being aware, in short, of contexts.

The "definitions" given by little children in school show
clearly how they associate words with situations; they almost
always define in terms of physical and social contexts:
"Punishment is when you have been bad and they put you
in a closet and don't let you have any supper." "Newspapers
are what the paper boy brings and you wrap up the garbage
with it." These are good definitions. The main reason that
they cannot be used in dictionaries is that they are too specific;
it would be impossible to list the myriads of situations in
which every word has been used. For this reason, dictionaries
give definitions on a high level of abstraction; that is, with
particular references left out for the sake of conciseness. This
is another reason why it is a great mistake to regard a dic-
tionary definition as "telling us all about" a word.

EXTENSIONAL AND INTENSIONAL

MEANING

From this point on, it will be necessary to employ some
special terms in talking about meaning: extensional meaning,
which will also be referred to as denotation, and intensional
meaning — note the s — which will also be referred to as con-

CONTEXTS 47

notation^ Briefly explained, the extensional meaning of an
utterance is that which it points to or denotes in the exten-
sional world, referred to in Chapter 3 above. That is to say,
the extensional meaning is something that cannot be expressed
in words, because it is that which words stand for. An easy
way to remember this is to put your hand over your mouth
and point whenever you are asked to give an extensional
meaning.

The intensional meaning of a word or expression, on the
other hand, is that which is suggested (connoted) inside one's
head. Roughly speaking, whenever we express the meaning
of words by uttering more words, we are giving intensional
meaning, or connotations. To remember this, put your hand
over your eyes and let the words spin around in your head.

Utterances may have, of course, both extensional and in-
tensional meaning. If they have no intensional meaning at
all — that is, if they start no notions whatever spinning about
in our heads — they are meaningless noises, Hke foreign lan-
guages that we do not understand. On the other hand, it is
possible for utterances to have no extensional meaning at all,
in spite of the fact that they may start many notions spinning
about in our heads. Since this point will be discussed more
fully in Chapter 5, perhaps one example will be enough: the
statement, "Angels watch over my bed at night," is one that
has intensional but no extensional meaning. This does not
mean that there are no angels watching over my bed at night.
When we say that the statement has no extensional meaning,
we are merely saying that we cannot see, touch, photograph,
or in any scientific manner detect the presence of angels.
The result is that, if an argument begins on the subject

1 The words extension and intension are borrowed from logic; denotation
and connotation are borrowed from literary criticism. The former pair of
terms will ordinarily be used, therefore, when we are talking about people's
"thinking habits"; the latter, when we are talking about words themselves.

48 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

whether or not angels watch over my bed, there is no way
of ending the argument to the satisfaction of all disputants,
the Christians and the non-Christians, the pious and the
agnostic, the mystical and the scientific. Therefore, whether
we believe in angels or not, knowing in advance that any
argument on the subject will be both endless and futile, we
can avoid getting into fights about it.

When, on the other hand, statements have extensional con-
tent, as when we say, "This room is fifteen feet long," argu-
ments can come to a close. No matter how many guesses there
are about the length of the room, all discussion ceases when
someone produces a tape measure. This, then, is the important
difference between extensional and intensional meanings:
namely, when utterances have extensional meanings, discus-
sion can be ended and agreement reached; when utterances
have intensional meanings only and no extensional meanings,
arguments may, and often do, go on indefinitely. Such argu-
ments can result only in irreconcilable conflict. Among indi-
viduals, they may result in the breaking up of friendships; in
society, they often split organizations into bitterly opposed
groups; among nations, they may aggravate existing tensions
so seriously as to become contributory causes of war.

Arguments of this kind may be termed "non-sense argu-
ments," because they are based on utterances about which no
sense data can be collected. Needless to say, there are occa-
sions when the hyphen may be omitted — that depends on
one's feelings toward the particular argument under considera-
tion. The reader is requested to provide his own examples of
"non-sense arguments." Even the foregoing example of the
angels may give oflfense to some people, in spite of the fact
that no attempt is made to deny or affirm the existence of
angels. He can imagine, therefore, the uproar that might re-
sult from giving a number of examples, from theology, poll-

CONTEXTS 49

tics, law, economics, literary criticism, and other fields in
which it is not customary to distinguish clearly sense from
non-sense.

THE **ONE WORD, ONE MEANING**
FALLACY

Everyone, of course, who has ever given any thought to the
meanings of words has noticed that they are always shifting
and changing in meaning. Usually, people regard this as a
misfortune, because it "leads to sloppy thinking" and "mental
confusion." To remedy this condition, they are likely to sug-
gest that we should all agree on "one meaning" for each word
and use it only with that meaning. Thereupon it will occur
to them that we simply cannot make people agree in this way,
even if we could set up an ironclad dictatorship under a com-
mittee of lexicographers who could place censors in every
newspaper office and dictaphones in every home. The situa-
tion, therefore, appears hopeless.

Such an impasse is avoided when we start with a new
premise altogether — one of the premises upon which modern
linguistic thought is based: namely, that no word ever has
exactly the same meaning twice. The extent to which this
premise fits the facts can be demonstrated in a number of
ways. First, if we accept the proposition that the contexts of
an utterance determine its meaning, it becomes apparent that
since no two contexts are ever exactly the same, no two mean-
ings can ever be exactly the same. How can we "fix the mean-
ing" even for as common an expression as "to believe in"
when it can be used in such sentences as the following?

I believe in you (I have confidence in you).

I believe in democracy (I accept the principles implied by the

term democracy).
I believe in Santa Claus (It is my opinion that Santa Claus exists).

so LANGUAGE IN ACTION

Secondly, we can take for example a word of "simple**'
meaning like "kettle." But when John says "kettle," its inten-
sional meanings to him are the common characteristics of all
the kettles John remembers. When Peter says "kettle," how-
ever, its intensional meanings to him are the common charac-
teristics of all the kettles he remembers. No matter how small
or how negligible the differences may be between John's
"\ettle" and Peter s "kettle," there is some di§erence.

Finally, let us examine utterances in terms of extensional
meanings. If John, Peter, Harold, and George each say "my
typewriter," we would have to point to four different type-
writers to get the extensional meaning in each case: John's
new Underwood, Peter's old Corona, Harold's L. C. Smith,
and the undenotable intended "typewriter" that George plans
some day to buy: "My typewriter, when I buy one, will be a
noiseless." Also, if John says "my typewriter" today, and again
"my typewriter" tomorrow, the extensional meaning is differ-
ent in the two cases, because the typewriter is not exactly the
same from one day to the next (nor from one minute to the
next) : slow processes of wear, change, and decay are going
on constantly. Although we can say, then, that the differences
in the meanings of a word on one occasion, on another occa-
sion a minute later, and on still another occasion another
minute later, are negligible, we cannot say that the meanings
are exactly the same.

j To say dogmatically that we "know what a word means"
'/« advance of its utterance is nonsense. All we can know in
advance is approximately what it will mean. After the utter-
ance, we interpret what has been said in the light of both
verbal and physical contexts, and act according to our inter-
pretation. An examination of the verbal context of an utter-
ance, as well as the examination of the utterance itself, di-
rects us to the intensional meanings; an examination of the
physical context directs us to the extensional meanings. When

CONTEXTS 51

John says to James, "Bring me that book, will you?" James
looks in the direction of John's pointed finger (physical con-
text) and sees a desk with several books on it (physical con-
text) ; he thinks back over their previous conversation (verbal
context) and knows which of those books is being referred to.

Interpretation must be based, therefore, on the totality of '
contexts. If it were otherwise, we should not be able to account
for the fact that even if we fail to use the right (customary)
words in some situations, people can very frequently under-
stand us. For example:

A. Gosh, look at that second baseman go!
B (looking). You mean the shortstop?
A. Yes, that's what I mean.

A. There must be something wrong with the oil line; the
engine has started to balk.

B. Don't you mean "gas line"?
A. Yes — didn't I say gas line?

Contexts sometimes indicate so clearly what we mean that
often we do not even have to say what we mean in order
to be understood.

THE IGNORING OF CONTEXTS

It is clear, then, that the ignoring of contexts in any act of
interpretation is at best a stupid practice. At its worst, it can
be a vicious practice. A common example is the sensational
newspaper story in which a few words by a public personage
are torn out of their context and made the basis of a com-
pletely misleading account. There is the incident of an Armi-
stice Day speaker, a university teacher, who declared before a
high-school assembly that the Gettysburg Address was "a
powerful piece of propaganda." The context clearly revealed
that "propaganda" was being used according to its dictionary

52 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

meanings rather than according to its popular meanings; it
also revealed that the speaker was a very great admirer of
Lincoln's. However, the local newspaper, completely ignoring
the context, presented the account in such a way as to con-
vey the impression that the speaker had called Lincoln a liar.
On this basis, the newspaper began a campaign against the
instructor. The speaker remonstrated with the editor of the
newspaper, who replied, in eflFect, "/ don't care what else you
said. You said the Gettysburg Address was propaganda, didn't
you?" This appeared to the editor complete proof that Lin-
coln had been maligned and that the speaker deserved to be
discharged from his position at the university. Similar prac-
tices may be found in advertisements. A reviewer may be
quoted on the jacket of a book as having said, "A brilliant
work," while reading of the context may reveal that what
he really said was, "It just falls short of being a brilliant
work." There are some people who will always be able to
find a defense for such a practice in saying, "But he did use
the words, *a brilliant work,' didn't he?"

People in the course of argument very frequently complain
about words meaning different things to different people.
Instead of complaining, they should accept it as a matter of
course. It would be startling indeed if the word "justice," for
example, were to have the same meaning to the nine justices
of the United States Supreme Court; we should get nothing
but unanimous decisions. It would be even more startUng if
"justice" meant the same to Fiorello La Guardia as to Josef
Stalin. If we can get deeply into our consciousness the princi-
ple that no word ever has the same meaning twice, we will
• develop the habit of automatically examining contexts, and
this enables us to understand better what others are saying.
As it is, however, we are all too likely to have signal reactions
to certain words and read into people's remarks meanings that
were never intended. Then we waste energy in angrily accus-

CONTEXTS 53

ing people of "intellectual dishonesty" or "abuse of words,"
when their only sin is that they use words in ways unlike
our own, as they can hardly help doing, especially if their
background has been widely different from ours. There are
cases of intellectual dishonesty and of the abuse of words, of
course, but they do not always occur in the places where peo-
ple think they do.

In the study of history or of cultures other than our own,
contexts take on special importance. To say, "There was no
running water or electricity in the house," does not condemn
an EngHsh house in 1570, but says a great deal against a house
in Chicago in 1941. Again, if we wish to understand the Con-
stitution of the United States, it is not enough, as our histori-
ans now tell us, merely to look up all the words in the dic-
tionary and to read the interpretations written by Supreme
Court justices. We must see the Constitution in its historical
context: the conditions of life, the current ideas, the fashion-
able prejudices, and the probable interests of the people who
drafted the Constitution. After all, the words "The United
States of America" stood for quite a different-sized nation
and a different culture in 1790 from what they stand for
today. When it comes to very big subjects, the range of con-
texts to be examined, verbal, social, and historical, may be-
come very large indeed.

THE INTERACTION OF WORDS

All this is not to say, however, that the reader might just
as well throw away his dictionary, since contexts are so im-
portant. Any word in a sentence — any sentence in a para-
graph, any paragraph in a larger unit — whose meaning is re-
vealed by its context, is itself part of the context of the rest of
the text. To look up a word in a dictionary, therefore, fre-
quently explains not only the word itself, but the rest of the

54 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

sentence, paragraph, conversation, or essay in which it is
found. All words within a given context interact upon one
another.

Realizing, then, that a dictionary is a historical work, we
should understand the dictionary thus: "The word mother has
most frequently been used in the past among English-speak-
ing people to indicate a female parent." From this we can
safely infer, "If that is how it has been used, that is what it
probably means in the sentence I am trying to understand."
This is what we normally do, of course; after we look up a
word in the dictionary, we re-examine the context to see if
the definition fits.

A dictionary definition, therefore, is an invaluable guide to
interpretation. Words do not have a single "correct meaning";
they apply to groups of similar situations, which might be
called areas of meaning. It is for definition in terms of areas
of meaning that a dictionary is useful. In each use of any
word, we examine the particular context and the extensional
events denoted (if possible) to discover the point intended
within the area of meaning.

APPLICATIONS

I. It has been said in this chapter that to say that one word
should have one meaning or that we can know the meaning
of a word in advance of its utterance is nonsense. Here are
some examples of the uses of the word air. To see how differ-
ent they actually are, translate the sentences into other words.

She had an air of triumph.

John left the casting director's office walking on air.

On summer nights the air was warm and fragrant.

He gave her the air.

Want some air in your tires, Mister.?

CONTEXTS 55

She certainly does give herself airs!

There was a suspicious air about the whole thing.

Slum children benefit from getting out into the air and sun-
light.

A gentle air was moving the curtains at the open window.

In 1789 change was in the air.

At that she just went up in the air.

High up in the air a hawk was circling.

The doctors say he needs a change of air.

It would be better if this whole dirty business were brought
out into the open air. . . . There's nothing better in such cases
than the free air of public discussion.

Jonathan was always building castles in the air.

As they left the theater, half of the audience was whisding the
catchy air.

When he got across the border he filled his lungs with the air
of freedom.

The Philharmonic is on the air every Sunday afternoon.

2. Provide contexts, in this case sentences, which illustrate
some of the various areas of meaning you can find in the
following words:

arm dog flight frog date people rich free

3. Sitting where you are, say the words, "Come here." Now
after moving to another seat, say "Come here" again. Is the
extensional meaning of the words still the same.? Has the
intensional meaning been aflected?

Take a blank sheet of paper and sign your name ten or a
dozen times. There are now before you ten or a dozen exam-
ples of the extensional meaning of the words "my signature."
Compare them. You might cut them apart and match them
up against a light. Are the extensional meanings in any two
cases the same.? Would they be the same if they were printed.?

"To make roasted potatoes, first wash the potatoes and peel

$6 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

them. After the potatoes have been peeled, parboil them and
place them in the pan with the roast to brown. When done,
serve the potatoes with gravy made from the juices of the
meat." What can you say about the extensionai meanings of
"potatoes" throughout this passage?

WORDS THAT DON'T
INFORM

Are words in Phafic Communion ["<r type of
speech in which ties of union are created by a
mere exchange of words" '\ used primarily to con-
vey meaning, the meaning which is symbolically
theirs? Certainly not! They fulfil a social function
and that is their principal aifn, but they are neither
the result of intellectual reflection, nor do they
necessarily arouse reflection in the listener.

B. MALINOWSKI

NOISES AS EXPRESSION 0?

WHAT complicates the problems of interpretation above
all is that often words are not used informatively at
all. In fact, we have every reason to believe that the ability
to use noises as symbols was developed only recently in the
course of our evolution. Long before we developed language
as we know it, we probably made, like the lower animals, all
sorts of animal cries, expressive of such internal conditions as
hunger, fear, triumph, and sexual desire. We can recognize
a variety of such noises and the conditions they indicate in
our domestic animals. Gradually these noises seem to have
become more and more difTerentiated : consciousness ex-
panded. Grunts and gibberings became symbolic language.
But, although we developed symbolic language, the habit of
making noises expressing, rather than reporting, our internal
conditions has remained. The result is that we use language
in presymbolic ways; that is, as the equivalent of screams,

58 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

howls, purrs, and gibbering. These presymboKc uses of lan-
guage coexist with our symbolic systems, and we still have
constant recourse to them in the talking we do in everyday
life.

The presymbolic character of much of our talk is most
clearly illustrated in cries expressive of strong feeling of any
kind. If, for example, we carelessly step ofT a curb when a
car is coming, it doesn't much matter whether someone yells,
"Look out!" or "Kiwotsuke!" or "Hey!" or "Prends garde!"
or simply utters a scream, so long as whatever noise is made
is uttered loud enough to alarm us. It is the fear expressed in
the loudness and the tone of the cry that conveys the neces-
sary sensations, and not the words. Similarly, commands
given sharply and angrily usually produce quicker results
than the same commands uttered tonelessly. The quality of
the voice itself, that is to say, has a power of expressing feel-
ings that is almost independent of the symbols used. We can
say, "I hope you'll come to see us again," in a way that clearly
indicates that we hope the visitor never comes back. Or again,
if a young lady with whom we are strolling says, "The moon
is bright tonight," we are able to tell by the tone whether
she is making a meteorological observation or indicating that
she wants to be kissed.

SNARL-WORDS AND PURR-WORDS

The making of noises with the vocal organs is a muscular
activity. Many of our muscular activities are involuntary.
Many of our speeches — especially exclamations — ^are likewise
involuntary. Our responses to powerful stimuli, such as to
something that makes us very angry, are a complex of muscu-
lar and physiological activities: the contraction of fighting
muscles, the increase of blood pressure, the tearing of hair,
and so on, and the making of noises, such as grorwls and

WORDS THAT DON T INFORM 59

snarls. Human beings, however, probably because they con-
sider it beneath their dignity to express their anger in purely
animalistic noises, do not ordinarily growl Uke dogs, but sub-
stitute series of words, such as "You dirty double-crosser!"
"You filthy scum!" Similarly, instead of purring or wagging
the tail, the human being again substitutes speeches such as
"She's the sweetest girl in all the world!" "Oh, dear, what a
cute baby!"

Speeches such as these are, therefore, complicated human
equivalents of snarling and purring and are not symbolic in
the same sense that the statement, "Chicago is in the state of
Illinois," is symbolic. That is to say, "She's the sweetest girl
in all the world" is not a statement about the girl, but a
revelation of the speaker's feelings — a revelation such as is
made among lower animals by wagging the tail or purring.
Similarly, the ordinary oratorical and editorial denunciation
of "Reds," "Wall Street," "corporate interests," "radicals,"
"economic royalists," and "fifth columnists," are often only
protracted snarls, growls, and yelps, with, however, the sur-
face appearance of logical and grammatical articulation. These
series of "snarl-words" and "purr-words," as it will be con-
venient to call them, are not reports describing conditions in
the extensional world, but symptoms of disturbance, un-
pleasant or pleasant, in the speaker.

Indeed, what we have called "judgments" in Chapter 3 —
words expressive of our likes and dislikes — are extremely com-
phcated snarls and purrs. Their principal function is to indi-
cate the approval or disapproval felt by the speaker, although,
to be sure, they often indicate at the same time the reasons
for those feelings. To call judgments snarls and purrs may
seem to be unduly disrespectful of the human race, but such
disrespect is not intended. The terminology is used merely to
emphasize the fact that judgments, like snarls and purrs, do-

6o LANGUAGE IN ACTION

not as such have extensional content. This is an important
point to remember in controversy.

For example, let us suppose that Smith has said, "Senator
Booth is a fourflusher," and that Jones has said, "Senator
Booth is a great statesman." The question most likely to be
argued, under what are now normal circumstances, will be,
"Is Senator Booth a fourflusher or a great statesman?" The
progress of such an argument is fairly predictable : Smith cites
facts to "prove" that the senator is a "fourflusher"; Jones
comes right back with other facts to "prove" the contrary.
Each will deny or belittle the facts advanced by the other.
Their voices will become louder; they will start to gesticulate
wildly; they will start shaking their fists under each other's
noses. Finally, their friends may have to separate them. Such
a conclusion, as we have seen, is inevitable when questions
without extensional content, or non-sense questions, are
argued.

Disputes about presymbolic utterances should therefore be
avoided. Often such snarls and purrs are not merely a matter
of a few words, but of paragraphs, of entire editorials or
speeches, and sometimes of entire books. The question to be
discussed should never take the form, "Is Hitler really a beast
as the speaker says?" but rather, "Why does the speaker feel
as he does?" Once we know why the judgment has been
made, we may follow the speaker in the judgment or make
a different one of our own.

All this is not to say that we should not snarl or purr.
In the first place, we couldn't stop ourselves if we wanted to;
and in the second, there are many occasions that demand good
violent snarls, as well as soft purrs of delight. Subtle and dis-
criminating judgments, made by sensitive and intelligent indi-
viduals, are well worth listening to, since they contribute to
our moral sensitivity. But we must guard ourselves against
'^mistaking these for reports.

WORDS THAT DON'T INFORM 6l

NOISES FOR noise's SAKE

There are, of course, other presymbohc uses of language.
Sometimes we talk simply for the sake of hearing ourselves
talk; that is, for the same reason that we play golf or dance.
The activity gives us a pleasant sense of being alive. Children
prattUng, adults singing in the bathtub, are alike enjoying the
sound of their voices. Sometimes large groups make noises
together, as in group singing, group recitation, or group
chanting, for similar presymbolic reasons. In all this, the sig-
nificance of the words used is almost completely irrelevant.
We often, for example, may chant the most lugubrious words
about a desire to be carried back to a childhood home in old
Virginia, when in actuality we have never been there and
haven't the slightest intention of going.

What we call "social conversation" is again presymbolic in
character. When we are at a tea or dinner party, for example,
we all have to talk — about anything: the weather, the per-
formance of the Chicago White Sox, Thomas Mann's latest
book, or Myrna Loy's last picture. It is typical of these con-
versations that, except among very good friends, few of the
remarks made on these subjects are ever important enough
to be worth making for their informative value. Nevertheless,
it is regarded as "rude" to remain silent. Indeed, in such
matters as greetings and farewells: "Good morning" —
"Lovely day" — "And how's your family these days?" — "It was
a pleasure meeting you" — "Do look us up the next time you're
in town" — it is regarded as a social error not to say these
things even if we do not mean them. There are numberless
daily situations in which we talk simply because it would be
impolite not to. Every social group has its own form of this
kind of talking — "the art of conversation," "small talk," or the
mutual "kidding" that Americans love so much. From these

62 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

social practices it is possible to infer, as a general principle,
that the prevention of silence is itself an important function
of speech, and that it is completely impossible for us in society
to talk only when we "have something to say."

This presymbolic talk for talk's sake is, like the cries of
animals, a form of activity. We talk together about nothing
at all and thereby estabUsh friendships. The purpose of the
talk is not the communication of information, as the symbols
used would seem to imply ("I see the Dodgers are out in the
lead again"), but the establishment of communion. Human
beings have many ways of establishing communion among
themselves: breaking bread together, playing games together,
working together. But talking together is the most easily
arranged of all these forms of collective activity. The together-
\ness of the talking, then, is the most important element in
social conversation; the subject matter is only secondary,

PRESYMBOLIC LANGUAGE IN RITUAL

Sermons, political caucuses, conventions, "pep rallies," and
other ceremonial gatherings illustrate the fact that all groups
— religious, political, patriotic, scientific, and occupational —
like to gather together at intervals for the purpose of sharing
certain accustomed activities, wearing special costumes (vest-
ments in religious organizations, regalia in lodges, uniforms
in patriotic societies, and so on), eating together (banquets),
displaying the flags, ribbons, or emblems of their group, and
marching in processions. Among these ritual activities is
always included a number of speeches, either traditionally
worded or specially composed for the occasion, whose princi-
pal function is not to give the audience information it did not
have before, not to create new ways of feeling, but something
else altogether.

What this something else is, we shall analyze more fully in

WORDS THAT DON'T INFORM 6}

Chapter 7 on "Directive Language." We can analyze now,
liowever, one aspect of language as it appears in ritual
speeches. Let us look at what happens at a "pep rally" such
as precedes college football games. The members of "our
team" are "introduced" to a crowd that already knows them.
Called upon to make speeches, the players mutter a few in-
coherent and often ungrammatical remarks, which are re-
ceived with wild applause. The leaders of the rally make fan-
tastic promises about the mayhem to be performed on the
opposing team the next day. The crowd utters "cheers," which
normally consist of animalistic noises arranged in extremely
primitive rhythms. No one comes out any wiser or better
informed than he was before he went in.

To some extent religious ceremonies are equally puzzling
at first glance. The priest or clergyman in charge utters set
speeches, often in a language incomprehensible to the con-
gregation (Hebrew in orthodox Jewish synagogues, Latin in
the Roman Catholic Church, Sanskrit in Chinese and Japa-
nese temples), with the result that, as often as not, no infor-
mation whatsoever is communicated to those present.

If we approach these linguistic events as students of lan-
guage trying to understand what is happening and if we
examine our own reactions when we enter into the spirit
of such occasions, we cannot help observing that, whatever
the words used in ritual utterance may signify, we often do
not think very much about their signification during the
course of the ritual. Most of us, for example, have often re-
peated the Lord's Prayer or sung "The Star-spangled Banner"
without thinking about the words at all. As children we are
taught to repeat such sets of words before we can under-
stand them, and many of us continue to say them for the
rest of our lives without bothering about their signification.
Only the superficial, however, will dismiss these facts as
"simply showing what fools human beings are." We cannot

64 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

regard such utterances as "meaningless," because they have a
genuine e£Fect upon us. We may come out of church, for
example, with no clear memory of what the sermon was
about, but with a sense nevertheless that the service has some-
how "done us good."

Ritualistic utterances, therefore, whether made up of words
that have symbolic significance at other times, of words in
foreign or obsolete tongues, or of meaningless syllables, may
be regarded as consisting in large part of presymbolic uses of
language: that is, accustomed sets of noises which convey no
information, but to which feelings (in this case group
feelings) are attached. Such utterances rarely make sense to
anyone not a member of the group. The abracadabra of a
lodge meeting is absurd to anyone but a member of the lodge.
When language becomes ritual, that is to say, its effect be-
comes to a considerable extent independent of whatever sig-
nifications the words once possessed.

THE IMPORTANCE OF UNDERSTAND-
ING THE PRESYMBOLIC USES OF
LANGUAGE

Presymbohc uses of language have this characteristic in
common : their functions can be performed, if necessary, with-
out the use of grammatically and syntactically articulated
i symbolic words. They can even be performed without recog-
nizable speech at all. Group feeling may be estabUshed, for
example, among animals by collective barking or howling,
and among human beings by college cheers, community sing-
ing, and such collective noise-making activities. Indications
of friendliness such as we give when we say "Good morning"
or "Nice day, isn't it?" can be given by smiles, gestures, or,
as among animals, by nuzzling or sniffing. Frowning, laugh-
ing, smiling, jumping up and down, can satisfy a large num-

WORDS THAT DON T INFORM 65

ber of needs for expression, without the use of verbal symbols.
But the use of verbal symbols is more customary among hu-
man beings, so that instead of expressing our feelings by
knocking a man down, we often verbally blast him to perdi-
tion; instead of drowning our sorrows in drink, we perhaps
write poems.

To understand the presymbolic elements that enter into our j
everyday language is extremely important. We cannot restrict
our speech to the giving and asking of factual information;
we cannot confine ourselves strictly to statements that are
literally true, or we should often be unable to say even
"Pleased to meet you" when the occasion demanded. The
intellectually persnickety are always telling us that we "ought
to say what we mean" and "mean what we say," and "talk
only when we have something to talk about." These are, of
course, impossible prescriptions.

Ignorance of the existence of these presymbolic uses of lan-
guage is not so common among uneducated people (who
often perceive such things intuitively) as it is among those
"educated" people who, having a great contempt for the
stupidity of others, have a correspondingly high opinion of
their own perspicacity. Such "enlightened" people listen to
the chatter at teas and receptions and conclude from the
triviality of the conversation that all the guests except them-
selves are fools. They may discover that people often come
away from church services without any clear memory of the
sermon and conclude that church-goers are either fools or
hypocrites. They may hear the political oratory of the opposi-
tion party, wonder "how anybody can believe such rot," and
conclude therefrom that people in general are so unintelligent
that it would be impossible for democracy to be made to
work. (They will overlook the fact, of course, that similar
conclusions could be drawn from the speeches they applaud •
at their own party conventions.) Almost all such gloomy con-

66 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

elusions about the stupidity or hypocrisy of our friends and
neighbors are unjustifiable on such evidence, because they
usually come from applying the standards of symbolic lan-
guage to linguistic events that are either partly or wholly pre-
symbolic in character.

One further illustration may make this clearer. Let us sup-
pose that we are on the roadside struggling with a flat tire.
A not-very-bright-looking but friendly youth comes up and
asks, "Got a flat tire?" If we insist upon interpreting his words
literally, we will regard this as an extremely silly question
and our answer may be, "Can't you see I have, you dumb
ox?" If we pay no attention to what the words say, however,
and understand his meaning, we will return his gesture of
friendly interest by showing equal friendliness, and in a short
while he may be helping us to change the tire. In a similar
;ivay, many situations in life as well as in literature demand
jthat we pay no attention to what the words say, since the
tneaning may often be a great deal more intelligent and
intelligible than the surface sense of the words themselves. It
is probable that a great deal of our pessimism about the world,
about humanity, and about democracy may be due in part
to the fact that unconsciously we apply the standards of sym-
bolic language to presymbolic utterances.

APPLICATIONS

Try to live a whole day without any presymbolic uses of
language, restricting yourself solely to (i) specific statements
of fact which contribute to the hearer's information; (2) spe-
cific requests for needed information or services. This exer-
cise is recommended only to those whose devotion to science
and the experimental method is greater thao their desire to
keep their friends.

CONNOTATIONS

Tens of thousands of years have elapsed since we
shed our tails, but we are still communicating with
a medium, developed to meet the needs of arboreal
man. . . . We may smile at the linguistic illusions
of primitive man, but may we forget that the
verbal machinery on which we so readily rely, and
with ti/hich our metaphysicians still profess to
probe the Nature of Existence, was set up by him,
and may be responsible for other illusions hardly
less gross and not more easily eradicable?

OGDEN AND RICHARDS

THE DOUBLE TASK OF LANGUAGE

REPORT language, as we have seen, is instrumental iii\
- character — that is, instrumental in getting work done;
presymbolic language expresses the feelings of the speaker,
and is an activity in itself, pleasurable or not, as the case ma^
be. Considering language from the point of view of the hearer,
we can say that report language informs us and that pre-
symbolic language affects us — that is, afFects our feelings.
When language is affective, it has the character of a kind of
force. A spoken insult, for example, provokes a return insult,
just as a blow provokes a return blow; a loud and peremptory
command compels, just as a push compels; talking and shout-
ing are as much a display of energy as the pounding of the
chest.

Now, if someone screams in a loud piercing voice, "the
HOUSE IS ON fire!!" two tasks are performed: first, insofar as

68 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

this utterance is a report, it informs us of a fact; secondly, in-
sofar as the loudness and the screaming quality of the voice
express the speaker's feelings, it affects our feelings. That is
to say, informative and affective elements are often present
at once in the same utterance/ And the first of the aflfective
elements in speech, as this example illustrates, is the tone of
voice, its loudness or softness, its pleasantness or unpleasant-
ness, its variations during the course of the utterance in
volume and intonation.

Another affective element in language is rhythm. Rhythm
is the name we give to the effect produced by the repetition
of auditory (or kinesthetic) stimuli at fairly regular intervals.
From the primitive beat of the tomtom to the most subtle
delicacies of civilized poetry and music, there is a continuous
development and refinement of man's responsiveness to
rhythm. To produce rhythm is to arouse attention and inter-
est; so aflfective is rhythm, indeed, that it catches our atten-
tion even when we do not want our attention distracted.
[Rhyme and alliteration are, of course, ways of emphasizing
rhythm in language, through repetition of similar sounds at
regular intervals. Political slogan-writers and advertisers there-
fore have a special fondness for rhyme and alliteration:
"Tippecanoe and Tyler Too," "Keep Cool with Coolidge,"
"Order from Horder," "Better Buy Buick"— totally absurd
slogans so far as informative value is concerned, but by virtue
of their sound capable of setting up small rhythmic echoes
in one's head that make such phrases difficult to forget.

1 Such terms as "emotional" and "emotive," which imply misleading dis-
tinctions between the "emotional appeals" and "intellectual appeals" of
language, should be carefully avoided. In any case, "emotional" applies too
specifically to strong feelings. The word "affective," however, in such an
expression as "the affective uses of language," describes not only the way in
which language can arouse strong feelings, but also the way in which it
arouses extremely subtle, sometimes unconscious, responses. "Affective" has
the further advantage of introducing no inconvenient distinctions between
"physical" and "mental" responses.

CONNOTATIONS 69

In addition to tone of voice and rhythm, another extremely
important affective element in language is the aura of feelings,
pleasant or unpleasant, that surrounds practically all words. It
will be recalled that in Chapter 4, a distinction was made
between denotations (or extensional meaning) pointing to
things, and connotations (or intensional meaning) "ideas,"
"notions," "concepts," and feelings suggested in the mind.
These connotations can be divided into two kinds, the in-
jormative and the affective.

INFORMATIVE CONNOTATIONS

The informative connotations of a word are its socially
agreed upon, "impersonal" meanings, insofar as meanings can
"'he given at all by additional words. For example, if we talk
about a "pig," we cannot readily give the extensional meaning
(denotation) of the word unless there happens to be an
actual pig around for us to point at; but we can give the
informative connotations: "mammahan domestic quadruped
of the kind generally raised by farmers to be made into pork,
bacon, ham, lard . . ." — which are connotations upon which
everybody can agree. Sometimes, however, the informative
connotations of words used in everyday life differ so much
from place to place and from individual to individual
that a special substitute terminology with more fixed informa-
tive connotations has to be used when special accuracy is de-
sired. The scientific names for plants and animals are an
example of terminology with such carefully established in-
formative connotations.

AFFECTIVE CONNOTATIONS

The affective connotations of a word, on the other hand,
are the aura of personal feelings it arouses, as, for example,

yO LANGUAGE IN ACTION

"pig": "Ugh! Dirty, evil-smelling creatures, wallowing in
filthy sties," and so on. While there is no necessary agreement
about these feelings — some people like pigs and others don't —
it is the existence of these feelings that enables us to use
words, under certain circumstances, for their affective conno-
tations alone, without regard to their informative connota-
tions. That is to say, when we are strongly moved, we express
our feelings by uttering words with the affective connotations
appropriate to our feelings, without paying any attention to
the informative connotations they may have. We angrily call
people "reptiles," "wolves," "old bears," "skunks," or lovingly
call them "honey," "sugar," "duck," and "apple dumpling."
Indeed, all verbal expressions of feeling make use to some ex-
tent of the affective connotations of words.

All words have, according to the uses to which they are
put, some affective character. There are many words that
I exist more for their affective value than for their informative
value; for example, we can refer to "that man" as "that gentle-
man," "that individual," "that person," "that gent," "that
guy," "that hombre," "that bird," or "that bozo"— and while
the person referred to may be the same in all these cases, each
of these terms reveals a difference in our feelings toward
him. Dealers in antiques frequently write "Gyfte Shoppe"
over the door, hoping that such a spelling carries, even if their
merchandise does not, the flavor of antiquity. Affective con-
notations suggestive of England and Scotland are often sought
in the choice of brand names for men's suits and overcoats:
"Glenmoor," "Regent Park," "Bond Street." Sellers of per-
fume choose names for their products that suggest France —
"Mon Desir," "Indiscret," "Evening in Paris" — and expensive
brands always come in "flacons," never in bottles. Consider,
too, the differences among the following expressions:

CONNOTATIONS 7I

I have the honor to inform Your Excellency . . .

This is to advise you . . .

I should like to tell you, sir . . .

I'm telling you, Mister . . .

Cheez, boss, git a load of dis . . .

The parallel columns below also illustrate how affective con-
notations can be changed while extensional meanings remain
the same :

Finest quality filet mignon.

Cubs trounce Giants 5-3.

McCormick Bill steam-roll-
ered through Senate.

Japanese divisions advance
five miles.

French armies in rapid re-
treat!

The governor appeared to be
gravely concerned and said
that a statement would be
issued in a few days after care-
ful examination of the facts.

First-class piece of dead cow.

Score: Cubs 5, Giants 3

Senate passes McCormick
Bill over strong opposition.

Japs stopped cold after five-
mile advance.

The retirement of the French
forces to previously prepared
positions in the rear was ac-
complished briskly and effi-
ciently.

The governor was on the
spot.

The story is told that during the Boer War, the Boers were
described in the British press as "sneaking and skulking be-
hind rocks and bushes." The British forces, when they finally
learned from the Boers how to employ tactics suitable to
veldt warfare, were described as "cleverly taking advantage
of cover."

72 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

A NOTE ON VERBAL TABOO

The affective connotations of some words create peculiar
situations. In some circles of society, for example, it is "impo-
lite" to speak of eating. A maid answering the telephone has
to say, "Mr. Jones is at dinner," and not, "Mr. Jones' is eating
dinner." The extensional meaning is the same in both cases,
but the latter form is regarded as having undesirable conno-
tations. The same hesitation about referring too baldly to eat-
ing is shown in the economical use made of the French and
Japanese words meaning "to eat," manger and taberu; a
similar delicacy exists in many other languages. Again, when
creditors send bills, they practically never mention "money,"
although that is what they are writing about. There are all
sorts of circumlocutions: "We would appreciate your early
attention to this matter." "May we look forward to an imme-
diate remittance. J'" "There is a balance in our favor which
we are sure you would like to clear up." Furthermore, we
ask movie ushers and filUng-station attendants where the
"lounge" or "rest room" is, although we usually have no in-
tention of lounging or resting; indeed, it is impossible in
polite society to state, without having to resort to a medical
vocabulary, what a "rest room" is for. The word "dead" like-
wise is used as little as possible by many people, who substi-
tute such expressions as "gone west," "passed away," "gone
to his reward," and "departed." In every language there is a
long list of such carefully avoided words whose affective con-
notations are so unpleasant or so undesirable that people can-
not say them, even when they are needed.

Words having to do with physiology and sex — and words
even vaguely suggesting physiological and sexual matters —
have, especially in American culture, remarkable affective
connotations. Ladies of the last century could not bring them-

CONNOTATIONS 73

selves to say "breast" or "leg" — not even of chicken — so that
the terms "white meat" and "dark meat" were substituted.
It was deemed inelegant to speak of "going to bed," and "to
retire" was used instead. Such verbal taboos are very numer-
ous and complicated, especially on the radio today. Scientists
and physicians asked to speak on the radio have been known
to cancel their speeches in despair when they discovered that
ordinary physiological terms, such as "stomach" and "bowels,"
are forbidden on some stations. Indeed, there are some words,
well known to all of us, whose aflfective connotations are so
powerful that if they were printed here, even for the purposes
of scientific analysis, this book would be excluded from all
public schools and libraries, and anyone placing a copy of it
in the United States mails would be subject to Federal prose-
cution!

The stronger verbal taboos have, however, a genuine social
value. When we are extremely angry and we feel the need
of expressing our anger in violence, the uttering of these for-
bidden words provides us with a relatively harmless verbal
substitute for going berserk and smashing furniture; that is,
they act as a kind of safety valve in our moments of crisis.

Why some words should have such powerful affective con-
notations while others with the sa?ne informative connota-
tions should not is difficult to explain fully. Some of our verbal
taboos, especially the religious ones, obviously originate in our
earlier belief in word-magic; the names of gods, for example,
were often regarded as too holy to be spoken. But all taboos
cannot be explained in terms of word-magic. According to
some psychologists, our verbal taboos on sex and physiology
are probably due to the fact that we all have certain feelings
of which we are so ashamed that we do not like to admit even
to ourselves that we have them. We therefore resent words
which remind us of those feelings, and get angry at the utterer
of such words. Such an explanation would confirm the fairly

74 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

common observation that those fanatics who object most
strenuously to "dirty" books and plays do so not because
their minds are especially pure, but because they are espe-
cially morbid.

EVERYDAY USES OF LANGUAGE

The language of everyday life, then, differs from "reports"
such as those discussed in Chapter 3. As in reports, we have
to be accurate in choosing words that have the informative
connotations we want; otherwise the reader or hearer will not
know what we are talking about. But in addition, we have
to give those words the affective connotations we want in
order that he will be interested or moved by what we are say-
ing and feel towards things the way we do. This double task
confronts us in almost all ordinary conversation, oratory, per-
suasive writing, and literature. Much of this task, however,
is performed intuitively; without being aware of it, we choose
the tone of voice, the rhythms, and the affective connotations
appropriate to our utterance. Over the informative connota-
tions of our utterances we exercise somewhat more conscious
control. Improvement in our ability to understand language,
as well as in our ability to use it, depends, therefore, not only
,• upon sharpening our sense for the informative connotations
/ of words, but also upon the sharpening of our intuitive per-
\ ceptions.

The following, finally, are some of the things that can
happen in any given speech event:

I. The informative connotations may be inadequate or mis-
leading, but the affective connotations may be sufficiently well
directed so that we are able to interpret correctly. For exam-
ple, when someone says, "Imagine who I saw today! Old
What's-his-name — oh, you know who I mean — Whoosis, that
old buzzard that lives on, oh — what's the name of that street 1"

CONNOTATIONS 75

there are means, certainly not clearly informative, by which
we manage to understand who is being referred to.

2. The informative connotations may be correct enough and
the extensional meanings clear, but the aflfective connotations
may be inappropriate, misleading, or ludicrous. This happens
frequently when people try to write elegantly: "Ji"^ ate so
many bags of Arachis hypogaea, commonly known as pea-
nuts, at the ball game today that he was unable to do justice
to his evening repast."

3. Both informative and affective connotations may "sound
all right," but there may be no "territory" corresponding to
the "map." For example: "He Uved for many years in the
beautiful hill country just south of Chicago." There is no
hill country just south of Chicago.

4. Both informative and affective connotations may be used
consciously to create "maps" of "territories" that do not exist.
There are many reasons why we should wish on occasion to
do so. Of these, only two need be mentioned now. First, we
may wish to give pleasure:

Yet mark'd I where the bolt of Cupid fell:

It fell upon a litde western flower,

Before milk-white, now purple with love's wound,

And maidens call it Love-in-idleness.

Fetch me that flower; the herb I show'd thee once:

The juice of it on sleeping eyelids laid

Will make or man or woman madly dote

Upon the next live creature that it sees.

Midsummer Night's Dream

A second reason is to enable us to plan for the future. For
example, we can say, "Let us suppose there is a bridge at the
foot of this street ; then the heavy traffic on High Street would
be partly diverted over the new bridge; shopping would be
less concentrated on High Street. . . ." Having visualized

76 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

the condition that would result, we can recommend or
oppose the bridge according to whether or not we like the
probable results. The relationship of present words to future
events is a subject we must leave for the next chapter.

APPLICATIONS

I. The relative absence of information and the deluge of
affective connotations in advertising is notorious. Neverthe-
less, it is revealing to analyze closely specimens like the
following, separating informative and affective connotations
into two parallel columns for contrast:

You'll enjoy different tomato juice made from aristocrat to-
matoes.

A new kind of shirt has been born! A shirt as advanced in con-
cept and performance as today's speediest, most luxurious planes!
A shirt that borrows its perfection from tomorrow — that offers a
COMBINATION of features unmatched by any other shirt of today!
Not one superiority — but the sum of many — make the new
PHiLADELPHiAN the most completely satisfactory shirt your money
can buy! Words cannot describe the way it fits, feels and looks
on you! You've got to see it and wear it to understand.

You'll sense this subtle feeling of young adventure the first
time you go for a Westwind glider ridel This car is built for
skimming over the roughest roads with the quiet smoothness of
a glider in flight. Cradled on long, liquidlike springs, cushioned
in chair-high seats "amidships," where riding is best, you're
billowed along while tremendous twelve-cylinder power whispers
and flows and surges and recedes as softly and gently as the
rise and fall of the tide.

The rich smoothness of Kingsway is the result of the re-dis-
covering of the almost lost art of bulking — an old-fashioned,
slow, deliberate method for mellowing fine tobaccos. In bulking,
an unhurried miracle of nature transpires; harsh qualities grow
mild, delicate aromas emerge, permeating every shred of the

CONNOTATIONS yj

superb Kingsway tobaccos. The result is a mellower, really
smoother smoke.

2. As we have seen, the statement, "His manner is rude
and uncultivated," can also be made by one who approaches
the situation in a more friendly Hght: "His manner is simple
and unspoiled." Try altering the following statements so that
they could still be applied to the same situations, yet convey
more favorable judgments:

The party bigwigs were reactionary.

Mrs. Smith was always prying into other people's affairs.

He is prejudiced against labor unions.

She is noisy and talkative.

He was flunked out of school.

They spend every cent he makes.

He is a renegade communist.

He was a spy during the World War.

The new government ruthlessly suppressed all opposition.

The crowd which welcomed the candidate was rowdy and
hysterical.

Congressman Blank is a demagogue.

Polonius was a sententious old fool.

He had a one-track mind on the subject of calendar reform.

A small group of willful men obstructed the vital legislation.

She never has to be asked twice to show off her piano-playing
at a party.

Men fall for her because she always acts cute and helpless.

DIRECTIVE LANGUAGE

The effect of a parade of sonorous phrases upon
human conduct has never been adequately studied.

THURMAN W. ARNOLD

MAKING THINGS HAPPEN

THE most interesting and perhaps least understood of the
relations between words and things is the relation be-
tween words and future events. When we say, for example,
"Come here!" we are not describing the extensional world
about us, nor are we merely expressing our feelings; we are
trying to ma^e something happen. What we call "commands,"
"pleas," "requests," and "orders" are the simplest ways we
have of making things happen by means of words. There are,
however, more roundabout ways. When we say, for example,
"Our candidate is a great American," we are of course making
an enthusiastic purr about him, but we may also be influenc-
ing other people to vote for him. Again, when we say, "Our
war against the enemy is God's war. God wills that we must
triumph," we are saying something that is incapable of scien-
tific verification; nevertheless, it may influence others to help
in the prosecution of the war. Or if we merely state as a fact,
"Milk contains vitamins," we may be influencing others to
buy milk.

Consider, too, such a statement as "I'll meet you tomorrow
at two o'clock in front of the Palace Theater." Such a state-
ment about future events can only be made, it will be ob-
served, in a system in which symbols are independent of

DIRECTIVE LANGUAGE 79

things symbolized. That is to say, a map can be made, in
spite of the fact that the territory it stands for is not yet an
actuahty. Guiding ourselves by means of such maps of terri-
tories-to-be, we can impose a certain predictability upon future
events.

With words, therefore, we influence and to an enormous
extent control future events. It is for this reason that writers
write; preachers preach; employers, parents, and teachers
scold; propagandists send out news releases; statesmen give
addresses. All of them, for various reasons, are trying to influ-
ence our conduct — sometimes for our own good, sometimes
for their own. These attempts to control, direct, or influence
the future actions of fellow human beings with words may
be termed directive uses of language.

Now it is obvious that if directive language is going to
direct, it cannot be dull or uninteresting. If it is to influence
our conduct, it must make use of every affective element in
language: dramatic variations in tone of voice, rhyme and
rhythm, purring and snarUng, words with strong affective
connotations, endless repetition. If meaningless noises will
move the audience, meaningless noises must be made; if
facts move them, facts must be given; if noble ideals move
them, we must make our proposals appear noble; if they will
respond only to fear, we must scare them stiff.

The nature of the affective means used in directive language
is limited, of course, by the nature of our aims. If we are
trying to direct people to be more kindly toward each other,
we obviously do not want to arouse feelings of cruelty or hate.
If we are trying to direct people to think and act more intelH-
gently, we obviously should not use subrational appeals. If
we are trying to direct people to lead better lives, we use
affective appeals that arouse their finest feelings. Included
among directive utterances, therefore, are many of the great-
est and most treasured works of literature: the Christian and

8o LANGUAGE IN ACTION

Buddhist scriptures, the writings of Confucius, Milton's Areo-
pagitica, and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.

There are, however, occasions when it is felt that language
is not sufficiently affective by itself to produce the results
wanted. We supplement directive language, therefore, by non-
verbal a-ffective appeals of many kinds. We supplement the
words "Come here" by gesturing with our hands. Advertisers
are not content with saying in words how beautiful their
products will make us; they supplement their words by the
use of colored inks and by pictures. A newspaper is not con-
tent with saying that the New Deal is a "menace"; it supplies
political cartoons depicting New Dealers as criminally insane
people placing sticks of dynamite under a magnificent build-
ing labeled "American way of life." The affective appeal of
sermons and religious exhortations may be supplemented by
costumes, incense, processions, choir music, and church bells.
A political candidate seeking office reinforces his speech-
making with a considerable array of nonverbal affective ap-
peals: brass bands, flags, parades, picnics, barbecues, and free
cigars.

Now, if we want people to do certain things and are in-
different as to why they do them, then no affective appeals
are excluded. Some political candidates want us to vote for
them regardless of our reasons for doing so. Therefore, if we
hate .the rich, they will snarl at the rich for us; if we dislike
strikers, they will snarl at strikers; if we like clambakes, they
will throw clambakes; if the majority of us like hillbilly
music, they may say nothing about the problems of govern-
ment and travel among their constituencies with hillbilly
bands. Again, most business firms want us to buy their prod-
ucts regardless of our reasons for doing so; therefore if de-
lusions and fantasies will lead us to buy their products, they
will seek to produce delusions and fantasies; if we want to be
popular with the other sex, they will promise us popularity;

DIRECTIVE LANGUAGE 8l

if we like pretty girls in bathing suits, they will associate
pretty girls in bathing suits with their products, whether they
are seUing shaving cream, automobiles, summer resorts, ice-
cream cones, house paint, or hardware. Only the law keeps
them from presenting pretty girls without bathing suits. The
records of the Federal Trade Commission, as well as the
advertising pages of any big-circulation magazine, show thai
some advertisers will stop at practically nothing.

THE IMPLIED PROMISES OF
DIRECTIVE LANGUAGE

Aside from the affective elements, verbal and nonverbal,
accompanying directive utterances that are intended simply
to attract attention or to create pleasant sensations — that is,
repetition, beauty of language, the pretty colors in advertise-
ments, brass bands in political parades, girl pictures, and so
on — practically all directive utterances say something about
the future. They are "maps," either explicitly or by implica-
tion, of "territories" that are to be. They direct us to do certain
things with the stated or implied promise that if we do these
things, certain consequences will follow: "If you adhere to
the Bill of Rights, your civil rights too will be protected."
"If you vote for me, I will have your taxes reduced." "Live
according to these religious principles, and you will have peace
in your soul." "Read this magazine, and you will keep up
with important current events." "Take McCarter's Liver Pills
and enjoy that glorious feeling that goes with regularity."
Needless to say, some of these promises are kept, and some
are not. Indeed, we encounter promises daily that are obvi-
ously incapable of being kept.

There is no sense in objecting as some people do to adver-
tising and political propaganda — the only kind of directives
they worry about — on the ground that they are based on

82 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

"emotional appeals." Unless directive language has affective
power of some kind, it is useless. We do not object to cam-
paigns that tell us, "Give to the Community Chest and enable
poor children to enjoy better care," although that is an "emo-
tional appeal." Nor do we resent being reminded of our love
of home, friends, and nation when people issue moral or patri-
otic directives at us. The important question to be asked of
any directive utterance is, "Will things happen as promised
if I do as I am directed? If I accept your philosophy, shall I
achieve peace of mind? If I vote for you, will my taxes be
reduced? If I use Lifeguard Soap, will my boy friend come
back to me?"

We rightly object to advertisers who make false or mis-
leading claims and to politicians who ignore their promises,
although it must be admitted that, in the case of politicians,
they are sometimes forced by their constituents against their
will to make promises they know they cannot keep. Life being
as uncertain and as unpredictable as it is, we are constantly
trying to find out what is going to happen next, so that we
may prepare ourselves. Directive utterances undertake to tell
us how we can bring about certain desirable events and how
we can avoid undesirable events. If we can rely upon what
they tell us about the future, the uncertainties of life are re-
duced. When, however, directive utterances are of such a
character that things do not happen as predicted — when, after
we have done as we were told, the peace in the soul has not
been found, the taxes have not been reduced, the boy friend
has not returned, and the nationally advertised gelatine has
not given us a surge of "quick energy," there is disappoint-
ment. Such disappointments may be trivial or grave; in any
event, they are so common that we do not even bother to
complain about some of them. They are all serious in their
implications, nevertheless. Each of them serves, in greater or
less degree, to break down that mutual trust that makes co-

DIRECTIVE LANGUAGE 83

operation possible and knits people together into a society.
Every one of us, therefore, who utters directive language,
with its concomitant promises, stated or imphed, is morally
obliged to be as certain as he can, since there is no absolute
certainty, that he is arousing no false expectations. Politicians
promising the immediate abolition of poverty, national adver-
tisers suggesting that tottering marriages can be restored to
bliss by a change in the brand of laundry soap used in the
family, newspapers threatening the collapse of the nation if
the party they favor is not elected — all such utterers of non-
sense are, for the reasons stated, menaces to the social order.
It does not matter much whether such misleading directives
are uttered in ignorance and error or with conscious intent to
deceive, because the disappointments they cause are all simi-
larly destructive of mutual trust among human beings.

THE FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIETY

However, preaching, no matter how noble, and propa-
ganda, no matter how persuasive, do not create society. We
can, if we wish, ignore such directives. We come now to di-
rective utterances that we cannot ignore if we wish to remain
organized in our social groups.

What we call society is a vast network of mutual agree-
ments. We agree to refrain from murdering our fellow citi-
zens, and they in turn agree to refrain from murdering us;
we agree to drive on the right-hand side of the road, and
others agree to do the same; we agree to deHver specified
goods, and others agree to pay us for them; we agree to ob-
serve the rules of an organization, and the organization agrees
to let us enjoy its privileges. This complicated network of
agreements, into which almost every detail of our Hves is
woven and upon which most of our expectations in Ufe are
based, consists essentially of statements about future events

84 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

which we are supposed, with our own efforts, to bring about.
Without such agreements, there would be no such thing as
society. All of us would be huddling in miserable and lonely
caves, not daring to trust anyone. With such agreements, and
a will on the part of the vast majority of people to live by
them, behavior begins to fall into relatively predictable pat-
terns; co-operation becomes possible; peace and freedom are
established.

Therefore, in order that we shall continue to exist as human
beings, we must impose patterns of behavior on each other.
We must make citizens conform to social and civic customs;
we must make husbands dutiful to their wives; we must
make soldiers courageous, judges just, priests pious, and
teachers solicitous for the welfare of their pupils. In early
stages of culture the principal means of imposing patterns
of behavior was, of course, physical coercion. But such
control can also be exercised, as human beings must have dis-
covered extremely early in history, by words — that is, by di-
rective language. Therefore, directives about matters which
society as a whole regards as essential to its own safety arc
made especially powerful, so that no individual in that society
will fail to be impressed with a sense of his obligations. To
make doubly sure, the words are further reinforced by the
assurance that punishment, possibly including torture and
death, will be visited upon those who fail to heed them.

DIRECTIVE UTTERANCES WITH
COLLECTIVE SANCTION

These directive utterances with collective sanction, which
try to impose patterns of behavior upon the individual in the
interests of the whole group, are among the most interesting
of linguistic events. Not only are they usually accompanied
by ritual; they are usually the central purpose of ritual. There

DIRECTIVE LANGUAGE

is probably no kind of utterance that we take more seriously,
that affects our lives more deeply, that we quarrel about more
bitterly. Constitutions of nations and of organizations, legal
contracts, and oaths of office are utterances of this kind; in
marriage vows, confirmation exercises, induction ceremonies,
and initiations, they are the essential constituent. Those terri-
fying verbal jungles called laws are simply the systematization
"^ of such directives, accumulated and modified through the
5" centuries. In its laws, society makes its mightiest collective

% effort to impose predictabiUty upon human behavior.

\ Directive utterances made under collective sanction may

\ exhibit any or all of the following features:

1. Such language is almost always phrased in words that
have affective connotations, so that people will be appropri-
ately impressed and awed. Archaic and obsolete vocabulary
or stilted phraseology quite unlike the language of everyday
life is employed. For example: "Wilt thou, John, take this
woman for thy lawful wedded wife.''" "This lease, made this
tenth day of July, a.d. One Thousand Nine Hundred and
Forty, between Samuel Smith, hereinafter called the Lessor,
and Jeremiah Johnson, hereinafter called Lessee, witnesseth,
that Lessor, in consideration of covenants and agreements
hereinafter contained and made on the part of the Lessee,
hereby leases to Lessee for a private dwelling, the premises
known and described as follows, to wit . . ."

2. Such directive utterances are often accompanied by ap-
peals to supernatural powers, who are called upon to help
carry out the vows, or to punish us if we fail to carry them
out. An oath, for example, ends with the words, "So help me
God." Prayers, incantations, and invocations accompany the
utterance of important vows in practically all cultures, from
the most primitive to the most civilized. These further serve,
of course, to impress our vows on our minds.

3. If God does not punish us for failing to carry out our

S6 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

agreements, it is made clear either by statement or implica-
tion that our fellow men will. For example, we all realize that
wc can be imprisoned for desertion, nonsupport, or bigamy;
sued for "breach of contract"; "unfrocked" for activities con-
trary to priestly vows; "cashiered" for "conduct unbecoming
an officer"; "impeached" for "betrayal of public trust"; shot
for "treason."

4. The formal and public utterance of the vows may be
preceded by preliminary disciplines of various kinds: courses
of training in the meaning of the vows one is undertaking;
fasting and self-mortification, as before entering the priest-
hood; initiation ceremonies involving physical torture, as
before being inducted into the warrior status among savage
peoples or membership in college fraternities.

5. The utterance of the directive language may be accom-
panied by other activities or gestures, all calculated to impress
die occasion on the mind. For example, everybody in a court-
room stands up when a judge is about to open a court; huge
processions and extraordinary costumes accompany coronation
ceremonies; academic gowns are worn for commencement
exercises; for many weddings, an organist and a soprano are
procured and special clothes are worn.

6. The uttering of the vows may be immediately followed
by feasts, dancing, and other joyous manifestations. Again the
purpose seems to be to reinforce still further the effect of the
vows. For example, there are wedding parties and receptions,
graduation dances, banquets for the induction of officers, and,
even in the most modest social circles, some form of "cele-
bration" when a member of the family enters into a compact
with society. In primitive cultures, initiation ceremonies for
chieftains may be followed by feasting and dancing that last
for several days or weeks.

7. In cases where the first utterance of the vows is not made
a special ceremonial occasion, the effect on the memory is

DIRECTIVE LANGUAGE 87

usually achieved by frequent repetition. The flag ritual ("I
pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States . . .") is re-
peated daily in some schools. Mottoes, which are briefly stated
general directives, are repeated frequently; sometimes they arc
stamped on dishes, sometimes engraved on a warrior's sword,
sometimes inscribed in prominent places such as gates, walls,
and doorways, where people can see them and be reminded of
their duties.

The common feature of all these activities that accompany
directive utterances, as well as of the affective elements in the
language of directive utterances, is the deep effect they have
on the memory. Every kind of sensory impression from the
severe pain of initiation rites to the pleasures of banqueting,
music, splendid clothing, and ornamental surroundings may
be employed; every emotion from the fear of divine punish-
ment to pride in being made the object of special public atten-
tion may be aroused. This is done in order that the individual
who enters into his compact with society — that is, the indi-
vidual who utters the "map" of the not-yet-existent "territory"
— shall never forget to try to bring that "territory" into exist-
ence.

For these reasons, such occasions as when a cadet receives
his commission, when a Jewish boy has his bar mizvah,
when a priest takes his vows, when a policeman receives his
badge, when a foreign-born citizen is sworn in as a citizen
of the United States, or when a president takes his oath of
office — these are events one never forgets. Even if, later on, a
person realizes that he has not fulfilled his vows, he cannot
shake off the feeling that he should have done so. All of us,
of course, use and respond to these ritual directives. The
phrases and speeches to which we respond reveal our deepest
religious, patriotic, social, professional, and political allegiances
more accurately than do the citizenship papers or member-
ship cards that we may carry in our pockets or the badges

88 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

that we may wear on our coats. A man who has changed his
rehgion after reaching adulthood will, on hearing the ritual
he was accustomed to hearing in childhood, often feel an urge
to return to his earlier form of worship. In such ways, then,
do human beings use words to reach out into the future and
control each other's conduct.

FOUR FOOTNOTES

Four notes may be added before we leave the subject of
directive language. Falsi, it should be remembered that, since
words cannot "say all" about anything, the promises implied
in directive language are never more than "outline maps" of
"territories-to-be." The future will fill in those outlines, often
in unexpected ways. Sometimes the future will bear no rela-
tion to our "maps" at all, in spite of all our endeavors to
bring about the promised events. We swear always to be good
citizens, always to do our duty, and so on, but we never quite
succeed in being good citizens every day of our lives or in
performing all our duties. A realization that directives cannot
fully impose any pattern on the future saves us from having
impossible expectations and therefore from suffering needless
disappointments.

Secondly, one should distinguish between the directive "is"
and the informative "is." Such statements as "A Boy Scout
is clean and chivalrous and brave" or "Policemen are de-
fenders of the weak" set up goals and do not necessarily de-
scribe the present situation. This is extremely important,
because all too often people understand such definitions as
being descriptive and are thereupon shocked, horrified, and
disillusioned upon encountering a Boy Scout who is not
chivalrous or a policeman who is a bully. They decide that
they are "through with all Boy Scouts" or "through with
all poUcemen," which, of course, is nonsense.

DIRECTIVE LANGUAGE 89

c Thirdly, it should be remarked that definitions, when they
are not descriptive statements about language, as is explained
more fully in Chapter 8, are almost always directives about
language. Definitions do not tell us anything about the things
for which a word stands; they merely direct us to use words
in certain ways. For example, if someone says to us, "Con-
scription may be defined as the organized trampling down of
human rights," he is telling us nothing directly about con-
scription, but merely telling us to talk about conscription in
the same way we would talk about anything else to which
the expression "the organized trampling down of human
rights" would be appUcable. Often such definitions are ad-
dressed to us with the air of revealing the "real nature" of
that which is defined: "That's what conscription really is!"
Even this book, perhaps, has sometimes sounded as if it were
revealing the "real nature" of certain linguistic processes. The
reader is hereby warned that no such purpose is intended.
It merely urges the reader to talJ{ about linguistic events in
specified ways, using, for example, such terms as "report,"
"symboHc process," "directive language," and "affective con-
notation." The implied promise behind this exhortation is that
if the reader does as he is told, he will find certain problems
clarified. Similar directives about what words to use under
what conditions are to be found in practically all expositions.
Finally, it should be remarked that many of our social di-
rectives and many of the rituals with which they are accom-
panied are antiquated and somewhat insulting to adult minds.
Rituals that originated in times when people had to be scared
into good behavior are unnecessary to people who already
have a sense of social responsibility. For example, a five-
minute marriage ceremony performed at the city hall for an
adult, responsible couple may "take" much better than a full-
dress church ceremony performed for an infantile couple. In
spite of the fact that the strength of social directives obviously

90 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

lies in the willingness, the maturity, and the intelligence of
the people to whom the directives are addressed, there is still
too much tendency to rely upon the efficacy of ceremonies as
such. This tendency is due, of course, to a lingering belief in
word-magic, the notion that, by saying things repeatedly or
in specified ceremonial ways, we can cast a spell over the
future and force events to turn out the way we said they
would — "There'll always be an England!" An interesting
manifestation of this superstitious attitude towards words and
rituals is to be found in some of our school boards and edu-
cators faced with the problem of "educating students for
democracy." Instead of increasing the time allotted for the
factual study of democratic institutions, enlarging the oppor-
tunities for the day-to-day exercise of democratic practices, and
thereby trying to develop the political insight and maturity
of their students, such educators content themselves by staging
bigger and better flag-saluting ceremonies and trebling the
occasions for singing "God Bless America." If, because of
such "educational" activities, the word "democracy" finally be-
comes a meaningless noise to some students, the result is
hardly to be wondered at.

APPLICATIONS

Most, but not all, of the following passages are directives.
What kind of directives are they, and what are their implied
promises .'*

Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.

A stitch in time saves nine.

There is no conflict between capital and labor.

Should auld acquaintance be forgot

And never brought to mind?

No parking.

DIRECTIVE LANGUAGE 9I

A man's best friend is his dog.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created
equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain un-
alienable Rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pur-
suit of happiness.

Gentlemen of the jury! Let us recognize this dastardly crime
for what it is — a cruel, cold-blooded murder!

A straight line is the shortest distance between two points.

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!

You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout

Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks!

King Lear

"Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my
life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever."

Psalms 23:6

THIS CERTIFIES THAT THERE IS ON DEPOSIT IN THE TREASURY OF THE

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

ONE DOLLAR

IN SILVER PAYABLE TO THE BEARER ON DEMAND

I hereby will and bequeath to my sister, Mary Anderson Jones,
and to her heirs and assigns, the sum of ten thousand dollars . . .

I do solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and
nothing but the truth, so help me God.

Are we downhearted? No!

And remember, ladies and gentlemen of the radio audience,
whenever you say "Blotto Coffee" to your grocer, you are saying
"Thank you" to us.

HOW WE KNOW WHAT WE
KNOW

The syllogism consists of propositions, propositions
consist of words, -words are symbols of notions.
Therefore if the notions them^selves, which is the
root of the matter, are confused and overhastily
abstracted from the facts, there can be no firmness
in the superstructure.

FRANCIS BACON

BESSIE, THE COW

THE universe is in a perpetual state of flux. The stars are
in constant motion, growing, cooling, exploding. The
earth itself is not unchanging; mountains are being worn
away, rivers are altering their channels, valleys are deepening.
All life is also a process of change, through birth, growth,
decay, and death. Even what we used to call "inert matter" —
chairs and tables and stones — is not inert, as we now know,
for, at the submicroscopic level, they are whirls of electrons.
If a table looks today very much as it did yesterday or as it
did a hundred years ago, it is not because it has not changed,
but because the changes have been too minute for our coarse
perceptions. To modern science there is no "solid matter." If
matter looks "solid" to us, it does so only because its motion
is too rapid or too minute to be felt. It is "solid" only in the
sense that a rapidly rotating color chart is "white" or a rapidly
spinning top is "standing still." Our senses are extremely
limited, so that we constantly have to use instruments such
as microscopes, telescopes, speedometers, stethoscopes, and

HOW WE KNOW WHAT WE KNOW 93

seismographs to detect and record occurrences which our
senses are not able to record directly. The way in which wc
happen to see and feel things is the result of the peculiarities
of our nervous systems. There are "sights" we cannot sec,
and, as even children know today with their high-frequency
dog whistles, "sounds" that we cannot hear. It is absurd,
therefore, to imagine that we ever perceive anything "as it
really is."

Inadequate as our senses are, with the help of instruments
they tell us a great deal. The discovery of micro-organisms
with the use of the microscope has given us a measure of
control over bacteria; we cannot see, hear, or feel radio waves,
but we can create and transform them to useful purpose. Most
of our conquest of the external world, in engineering, in
chemistry, and in medicine, is due to our use of mechanical
contrivances of one kind or another to increase the capacity
of our nervous systems. In modern life, our unaided senses arc
not half enough to get us about in the world. We cannot even
obey speed laws or compute our gas and electric bills with-
out mechanical aids to perception.

To return, then, to the relations between words and what
they stand for, let us say that there is before us "Bessie," a
cow. Bessie is a living organism, constantly changing, con-
stantly ingesting food and air, transforming it, getting rid of it
again. Her blood is circulating, her nerves are sending mes-
sages. Viewed microscopically, she is a mass of variegated
corpuscles, cells, and bacterial organisms; viewed from the
point of view of modern physics, she is a perpetual dance of
electrons. What she is in her entirety, we can never know;
even if we could at any precise moment say what she was,
at the next moment she would have changed enough so that
our description would no longer be accurate. It is impossible
to say completely vvhat Bessie or anything else really is. Bessie
is no static "object," but a dynamic process.

94 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

The Bessie that we experience, however, is something else
again. We experience only a small fraction of the total Bessie:
the lights and shadows of her exterior, her motions, her gen-
eral configuration, the noises she makes, and the sensations
she presents to our sense of touch. And because of our pre-
vious experience, we observe resemblances in her to certain
other animals to which, in the past, we have applied the word
"cow."

THE PROCESS OF ABSTRACTING

The "object" of our experience, then, is not the "thing
in itself," but an interaction between our nervous systems
{with all their imperfections) and something outside them.
Bessie is unique — there is nothing else in the universe exactly
like her in all respects. But our nervous systems, automatically
abstracting or selecting from the process-Bessie those features
of hers in which she resembles other animals of like size,
functions, and habits, classify her as "cow."

When we say, then, that "Bessie is a cow," we are only
noting the process-Bessie's resemblances to other "cows" and
ignoring differences. What is more, we are leaping a huge
chasm: from the dynamic process-Bessie, a whirl of electro-
chemico-neural eventfulness, to a relatively static "idea," "con-
cept," or word, "cow." The reader is referred to the diagram
entitled "The Abstraction Ladder," which he will find on
page 96.

As the diagram illustrates, the "object" we see is an abstrac-
tion of the lowest level, but it is still an abstraction, since it
leaves out characteristics of the process that is the real Bessie.
Theiwr^'Bessie" (cowi) is the lowest verbal level of abstrac-
tion, leaving out further characteristics — the differences be-
tween Bessie yesterday and Bessie today, between Bessie today
and Bessie tomorrow — and selecting only the similarities.

HOW WE KNOW WHAT WE KNOW 95

The word "cow" selects only the similarities between Bessie
(coWi), Daisy (C0W2), Rosie (cows), and so on, and therefore
leaves out still more about Bessie. The word "livestock" selects
or abstracts only the features that Bessie has in common with
pigs, chickens, goats, and sheep. The term "farm asset" ab-
stracts only the features Bessie has in common with barns,
fences, livestock, furniture, generating plants, and tractors,
and is therefore on a very high level of abstraction. A branch
hne has been drawn in the diagram to indicate the fact that
in discussing Bessie for different purposes abstracting may be
done in different ways. This point will be discussed more
fully in Chapter 10.

WHY WE MUST ABSTRACT

This process of abstracting, of leaving characteristics out, is
an indispensable convenience. To illustrate by still another
example, suppose that we live in an isolated village of four
families, each owning a house. A's house is referred to as
maga; B's house is biyo; C's is kjita, and D's is pelel. This is
quite satisfactory for ordinary purposes of communication in
the village, unless a discussion arises about building a new
house — a spare one, let us say. We cannot refer to the pro-
jected house by any one of the four words we have for the
existing houses, since each of these has too specific a meaning.
We must find a general term, at a higher level of abstraction,
that means "something that has certain characteristics in
common with maga, biyo, \ata, and pelel, and yet is not A's,
B's, C's, or D's." Since this is much too complicated to say
each time, an abbreviation must be invented. Let us say we
choose the noise, house. Out of such needs do our words come
— they are a form of shorthand. The invention of a new ab-
straction is a great step forward, since it ma\es discussion
possible — as, in this case, not only the discussion of a fifth

THE ABSTRACTION LADDER
Start Reading from Bottom UP

Etc.

"organism" '
"animal"
"quadruped"
"bovine"

The word "cow": fur-
ther characteristics left

The word "Bessie"
(cow^): further char-
acteristics left out.

Etc.

o o 6 o o 1
o o o o o 1

o o o o o
o o o o o

o o ^

o O i

!> o o

poo

o o i

jo§sl

Is 2 ° 2 2 I "wealth"

I o o <? o o I

The object of ex-
perience: an inter-
action between our
nervous system and

The cow known
to science: a mass
of flying elec-
trons, known only
through scientific
inference. Circles

"assets"
"farm assets"

"livestock"

out. A somewhat higher
level of abstraction.

This is the lowest
verbal level of abstrac-
tion.

something outside it.
Diagram is circular
to indicate that char-
acteristics, though
many, are finite.

indicate character-
istics; broken edge
indicates that

characteristics arc
infinite. This is
the process level.

^ Adapted, by kind permission, from the "Structural Differential,"
copyrighted by A. Korzybski.

HOW WE KNOW WHAT WE KNOW 97

house, but of all future houses we may build or see in our
travels or dream about. There is no such thing as "a house."
"A house" is an abstraction. There are only houses — housei,
house2, houses, and so on — each one distinct, each with charac-
teristics not possessed by other houses.

The word
"house''

The
word

/o o 6 o o Q.

,0 oo\

(Adapted, by kind permission, from Science and Sanity by A. Korzybski.)

The indispensability of this process of abstracting can again
be illustrated by what we do when we "calculate." The word
"calculate" originates from the Latin word calculus, meaning
"pebble," and comes to have its present meaning from such
ancient practices as that of putting a pebble into a box for
each sheep as it left the fold, so that one could tell, by check-
ing the sheep returning at night against the pebbles, whether
any had been lost. Primitive as this example of calculation is,
it will serve to show why mathematics works. Each pebble is,
in this example, an abstraction representing the "oneness" of
each sheep — its numerical value. And because we are abstract-

98 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

ing from extensional events on clearly understood and uni-
form principles, the numerical facts about the pebbles are also,
barring unforeseen circumstances, numerical facts about the
sheep. Our x's and y's and other mathematical symbols are
similar abstractions, although of still higher level. And they
are useful in predicting occurrences and in getting work done
because, since they are abstractions properly and uniformly
made from starting points in the extensional world, the rela-
tions revealed by the symbols will be, again barring unfore-
seen circumstances, relations existing in the extensional world.

ONDEFINITIONS

Definitions, contrary to popular opinion, tell us nothing
about things. They only describe people's linguistic habits;
that is, they tell us what noises people make under what con-
ditions. Definitions should be understood as_ statements about
language. — ^^''^^'^^^-^f.-.^,...*.,....,:.,,..

House. This is a word, at the next higher level of abstraction,
that can be substituted foi the more cumbersome expression,
"Something that has characteristics in common with Bill's bunga-
low, Jordan's cottage, Mrs. Smith's tourist home. Dr. Jones's
mansion , . ."

Red. A feature that rubies, roses, ripe tomatoes, robins' breasts,
uncooked beef, and lipsticks have in common is abstracted, and
this word expresses that abstraction.

Kangaroo. Where the biologist would say "herbivorous mam-
mal, a marsupial of the family Macropodidae," ordinary people
say "kangaroo."

Now it will be observed that while the definitions of
"house" and "red" given here point down the abstraction
ladder (see the charts) to lower levels of abstraction, the defi-
nition of "kangaroo" remains at the same level. That is to
say, in the case of "house," we could if necessary go and loo\
at Bill's bungalow, Jordan's cottage, Mrs. Smith's tourist

HOW WE KNOW WHAT WE KNOW 99

home, and Dr. Jones's mansion, and figure out for ourselves
what features they seem to have in common; in this way,
we might begin to understand under what conditions to use
the word "house." But all we know about "kangaroo" from
the above is that where some people say one thing, other
people say another. That is, when we stay at the same level
of abstraction in giving a definition, we do not give any
information, unless, of course, the listener or reader is already
sufficiently familiar with the defining words so that he can
work himself down the abstraction ladder. Dictionaries, in
order to save space, have to assume in many cases such fa-
miliarity with the language on the part of the reader. But
where the assumption is unwarranted, definitions at the same
level of abstraction are worse than useless. Looking up "in-
difference" in some cheap pocket dictionaries, we find it de-
fined as "apathy"; we look up "apathy" and find it defined
as "indifference."

Even more useless, however, are the definitions that go up
the abstraction ladder to higher levels of abstraction — the kind
most of us tend to make automatically. Try the following
experiment on an unsuspecting friend:

"What is meant by the word red?"

"It's a color."

"What's a color?"

"Why, it's a quality things have."

"What's a quality?"

"Say, what are you trying to do, anyway?"

You have pushed him into the clouds. He is lost.

If, on the other hand, we habitually go down the abstrac-
tion ladder to lower levels of abstraction when we are asked
the meaning of a word, we are less likely to get lost in verbal
mazes; we will tend to "have our feet on the ground" and
know what we are talking about. This habit displays itself in
an answer such as this:

lOO LANGUAGE IN ACTION

"What is meant by the word red?"

"Well, the next time you see a bunch of cars stopped at an
intersection, look at the traffic light facing them. Also, you might
go to the fire department and see how their trucks are painted."

CHASING ONESELF IN VERBAL
CIRCLES

In other words, the kind of "thinking" we must be ex-
tremely wary of is that which never leaves the higher
verbal levels of abstraction, the kind that never points down
the abstraction ladder to lower levels of abstraction and from
there to the extensional world:

"What do you mean by democracy?"

"Democracy means the preservation of human rights."

"What do you mean by rights?"

"By rights I mean those privileges God grants to all of us — I
mean man's inherent privileges."

"Such as?"

"Liberty, for example."

"What do you mean by liberty?"

"Religious and political freedom."

"And what does that mean?"

"Religious and political freedom is what we have when we do
things the democratic way."

Of course it is possible to talk meaningfully about democ-
racy, as Jefferson and Lincoln have done, as Charles and Mary
Beard do in The Rise of American Civilization, as Frederick
Jackson Turner does in The Frontier in American History,
as Lincoln Steflens does in his Autobiography, as Thurman
Arnold does in The Bottleneckj of Business — to name only
the first examples that come to mind — but such a sample as
the above is not the way to do it. The trouble with speakers
who never leave the higher levels of abstraction is not only
that they fail to notice when they are saying something and

HOW WE KNOW WHAT WE KNOW lOI

when they are not; they also produce a similar lack of dis-
crimination in their audiences. Never coming down to earth,
they frequently chase themselves around in verbal circles, un-
aware that they are making meaningless noises.

This is by no means to say, however, that we must never
make extensionally meaningless noises. When we use directive
language, when we talk about the future, when we utter
ritual language or engage in social conversation, and when
we express our feelings, we are usually making utterances
that have no extensional verifiability. It must not be over-
looked that our highest ratiocinative and imaginative powers
are derived from the fact that symbols are independent of
things symbolized, so that we are free not only to go quickly
from low to extremely high levels of abstraction (from
"canned peas" to "groceries" to "commodities" to "national
wealth") and to manipulate symbols even when the things
they stand for cannot be so manipulated ("If all the freight
cars in the country were hooked up to each other in one long
line . . ."), but we are also free to manufacture symbols at
will even if they stand only for abstractions made from other
abstractions and not for anything in the extensional world.
Mathematicians, for example, often play with symbols that
have no extensional content, just to find out what can be done
with them; this is called "pure mathematics." And pure
mathematics is far from being a useless pastime, because
mathematical systems that are elaborated with no extensional
application in mind often prove later to be applicable in use-
ful and unforeseen ways. Mathematicians, however, when
they are dealing with extensionally meaningless symbols,
usually know what they are doing. We likewise must know
what we are doing.

Nevertheless, all of us (including mathematicians), when
we speak the language of everyday life, often make meaning-
less noises without knowing that we are doing so. We have

I02 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

already seen what confusions this can lead to. The funda-
mental purpose of the abstraction ladder, as shown both in
this chapter and the next, is to make us aware of the process
of abstracting.

APPLICATIONS

1. Arrange the following words in order of increasing ab-
straction, starting as nearly as possible at the bottom of the
abstraction ladder.

a. Man, male, Herbert F. Jackson, human being, American,
lowan, "redhead."

b. Fruit, orchard crop, apple, agricultural product, pome, article
of international trade, article of export, Winesap.

c. Paul Robeson, artist, basso, singer, Negro, man. Phi Beta
Kappa, athlete, football player. Use as many branch lines in
your diagram as you find you need.

d. Retail business, our distribution system, McGreevy's Drug
Store, business, the economic life of the nation, the drug busi-
ness.

e. Newspaper, the New York Times, a daily, channel of public
information, the press, a publication.

2. The foregoing examples of the abstracting process have
all of necessity begun with the verbal levels of abstraction.
Starting with some object that you have at hand, a book,
pencil, chair, window — something that you can see, touch, or
hear — make some abstraction ladders beginning with the ob-
ject level. Note carefully what characteristics you are leaving
out as you abstract.

3. Apply the following terms to events in the exten-
sional world — i.e. go down the abstraction ladder: American
standard of living, college, human nature, national honor, an
insult.

y. THE LITTLE MAN WHO
WASN'T THERE

'Everybody is familiar with the fact that the ordi-
nary man does not see things as they are, but only
sees certain fixed types. . . . Mr. Walter Sickerf is
in the habit of telling his pupils that they are un-
able to draw any individual arm because they think
of it as an arm; and because they think of it as an
arm they think they know what it ought to be.

T. E. HULME

HOW NOT TO START A CAR

THERE was recently a story in the newspapers about a
man who, having trouble with his car, got angry at it and
"poked it one in the eye" — that is, he smashed his fist through
one of the headlights. (The newspapers learned about it when
he turned up at a hospital to get his hand bandaged.) He
got angry at the car just as he might have got angry at a
person, horse, or mule that was stubborn and unco-operative.
He thereupon proceeded to "teach" that car "a lesson." He
may be said to have had a signal reaction to the behavior of
the car — a complete, unreflective, automatic reaction.

Savages, of course, often behave in similar ways. When
crops fail or rocks fall upon them, they "make a deal with" —
offer sacrifices to — the "spirits" of vegetation or the "spirits"
of the rocks, in order to obtain better treatment from them
in the future. All of us, however, have certain reactions of
similar kinds: sometimes, tripping over a chair, we kick it
and call it names; some people, indeed, when they fail to get

10.3

I04 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

letters, get angry at the postman. In all such behavior, we
confuse the abstraction which is inside our heads with that
which is outside and act as if the abstraction were the event
in the outside world. We create in our heads an imaginary
chair that maliciously trips us and then "punish" the exten-
sional chair that bears ill will to nobody; we create an imagi-
nary postman who is "holding back our mail" and bawl out
the extensional postman who would gladly bring us letters if
he had any to bring.

THE CONFUSION OF LOWER LEVELS
OF ABSTRACTION

In a wider sense, however, we are confusing levels of ab-
straction— confusing that which is inside our heads with that
which is outside — all the time. For example, we talk about
the yellowness of a pencil as if the yellowness were a "prop-
erty" of the pencil and not a product, as we have seen, of
the interaction of something outside our skins with our
nervous systems. We confuse, that is to say, the two lowest
levels of the abstraction ladder (see page 96) and treat them
as one. Properly speaking, we should not say, "The pencil
is yellow," which is a statement that places the yellowness
in the pencil; we should say instead, "That which has an
effect on me which leads me to say 'pencil' also has an effect
on me which leads me to say 'yellow.' " We don't have to be
that precise, of course, in the language of everyday life, but
it should be observed that the latter statement takes into con-
sideration the part our nervous systems play in creating what-
ever pictures of reality we may have in our heads, while the
former statement does not.

Now this habit of confusing that which is inside our skins
and that which is outside is essentially that naive reaction of
children and savages, although it persists in "grown-ups."

LITTLE MAN WHO WASN't THERE IO5

The more advanced civilization becomes, the more conscious
we must be that our nervous systems automatically leave out
characteristics of the events before us. If we are not aware of
characteristics left out, if we are not conscious of the process
of abstracting, we make seeing and believing a single process.
If, for example, you react to the twenty-second rattlesnake you
have seen in your life as if it were identical with the abstrac-
tion you have in your head as the result of the last twenty-
one rattlesnakes you have seen, you may not be far out in
your reactions. But civilized life provides our nervous systems
with more complicated problems than rattlesnakes to deal
with. There is a case cited by Korzybski in Science and
Sanity of a man who suffered from hay fever whenever there
were roses in the room. In an experiment, a bunch of roses
was produced unexpectedly in front of him, and he immedi-
ately had a violent attack of hay fever, despite the fact that
the "roses" in this case were made of paper. That is, his
nervous system saw-and-believed in one operation.

CONFUSING HIGHER LEVELS OF
ABSTRACTION

But words, as we have seen by means of the abstraction
ladder, are still higher levels of abstraction than the "objects"
of experience. The more words at extremely high levels of
abstraction we have, then, the more conscious we might be
of this process of abstracting. For example, the word "rattle-
snake" leaves out every important feature of the actual rattle-
snake. But if the word is vividly remembered as part of a
whole complex of terrifying experiences with an actual rattle-
snake, the word itself is capable of arousing the same feelings
as an actual rattlesnake. There are people, therefore, who turn
pale at the word.

This, then, is the origin of word-magic. The word "rattle-

I06 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

snake" and the actual creature are felt to be one and the
same thing, because they arouse the same feelings. This
sounds like nonsense, of course, and it is nonsense. But from
the point of view of a childish logic, it has its justification.
As Levy-Bruhl explains in his How Natives Thin\, primitive
"logic" works on such a principle. The creature frightens us;
the word frightens us; therefore the creature and the word
are "the same" — not actually the same, perhaps, but there is a
"mystic connection" between the two. This sense of "mystic
connection" is Levy-Bruhl's term for what we have called
"necessary connection" in our discussion of linguistic naivete.
In this way, "mystical power" is attributed to words. There
come to be "fearful words," "forbidden words," "unspeakable
words" — words taking on the characteristics of the things
they stand for. Such feelings as these about the power of
words are, as we have already seen, probably in part responsi-
ble for such social phenomena as the strenuous campaign
in the early 1930's to bring back prosperity through frequent
reiteration of the words, "Prosperity is around the corner!"

The commonest form of this confusion of levels of abstrac-
tion, however, is illustrated by our reacting to the twenty-
second Republican we encounter in our lives as if he were
identical with the abstraction "Republican" inside our heads.
"If he's Republican, he must be O.K. — or terrible," we are
likely to say, confusing the extensional Republican with our
abstraction "Republican," which is the product not only of
the last twenty-one "Republicans" we have met, but also of
all that we have been told about "Republicans."

**JEWS"

To make the principles clearer, we shall use an example
that is loaded with prejudices for many people: "Mr. Miller
is a ]ew." To such a statement, some "Christians" have a

LITTLE MAN WHO WASN T THERE lOJ

marked signal reaction, which may take such forms as these:
automatically deciding that Mr. Miller is not the kind of
person one likes to meet socially, although, of course, one
cannot help running into "Jews" in business; automatically
excluding him from tenancy in the apartment house one owns
or from membership in the fraternity or country club one
belongs to; automatically putting oneself on guard against
his expected sharp financial practices; automatically suspect-
ing his political views of being "tinged with communism";
automatically shrinking away.

That is to say, a "Christian" of this kind confuses his high-
level abstraction, "Jew," with the extensional Mr. Miller and
behaves towards Mr. Miller as if he were identical with that
abstraction. (See the abstraction ladder, page 96.)

Now it happens that the word "Jew," as the result of a
number of historical accidents, has powerful affective connota-
tions in Christian culture. Jews, a small minority in medieval
Christendom, were the only people legally permitted to lend
money at interest because of the Christian proscriptions
against usury. They were excluded from agriculture and
from most professions because they were "non-Christians."
As non-Christians they were regarded by the ignorant and
the superstitious with terror. Nevertheless, a few Jews had to
be tolerated, because money-lenders were necessary to the de-
velopment of business. It became the standard practice of
Christians, therefore, to borrow money from Jews to satisfy
their business requirements, meanwhile calling them names
to satisfy their consciences — just as, during Prohibition in the
United States, it was a fairly common practice to patronize
bootleggers to satisfy one's thirst, meanwhile denouncing
them for "lawlessness" on all pubHc occasions to satisfy one's
conscience. Furthermore, many princes and noblemen who
owed large sums of money to Jews made the happy discovery
that it was easy to avoid the payment of their debts by arous-

I08 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

ing the superstitious populace to torturing and massacring the
Jews on the pretext of "holy crusades." After such incidents,
the Jews would be either dead or willing to cancel the debts
owed them in order to save their lives. Such business risks
would further increase the interest rates, even as the risk of
police raids increased the price of bootleg liquor. The in-
creased interest rates would further infuriate the Christians.
The word "]tw" therefore, came to have increasingly power-
ful affective connotations, expressing at once the terror felt
by Christians toward non-Christians and the resentment felt
by people everywhere toward money-lenders, who are always
felt to be "grasping," "unscrupulous," and "cunning." The
moral objections to money-lending disappeared, of course,
especially after people began to found new forms of Chris-
tianity, partly in order that they might freely engage in that
profession. Nevertheless, the affective connotations of the
word "Jew" survived and have remained, even to this day.
They reveal their continued existence in such uses of the term
as these: "He jewed me out of ten dollars," "Go on and
give him some money; don't be such a ]eu;," "He jewed
down the price." In some circles, it is not uncommon for
mothers to discipline disobedient children by saying to them,
"If you don't behave, I'll sell you to the ]ew man."

Let us return now to our hypothetical Mr. Miller, who has
been introduced as a "Jew." To a person for whom these
affective connotations are very much alive — and there are
many such — and who habitually confuses that which is inside
his nervous system with that which is outside, Mr. Miller is a
man "not to be trusted." If Mr. Miller succeeds in business,
that "proves" that "Jews are smart"; if Mr. Johansen succeeds
in business, it only proves that Mr. Johansen is smart. If Mr.
Miller fails in business, it is alleged that he nevertheless has
"money salted away somewhere." If Mr. Miller is strange or
foreign in his habits, that "proves" that "Jews don't assimi-

LITTLE MAN WHO WASN T THERE 109

late." If he is thoroughly American — i.e., indistinguishable
from other natives — he is "trying to pass himself of! as one
of us." If Mr. Miller fails to give to charity, that is because
"Jews are tight"; if he gives generously, he is "trying to buy
his way into society." If Mr. Miller lives in the Jewish section
of town, that is because "Jews are so clannish"; if he moves
to a locality where there are no other Jews, that is because
"they try to horn in everywhere." In short, Mr. Miller is
automatically condemned, no matter who he is or what he
does.

But Mr. Miller may be, for all we know, rich or poor, a
wife beater or a saint, a stamp collector or a violinist, a farmer
or a physicist, a lens grinder or an orchestra leader. If, as the
result of our signal reactions, we put ourselves on guard
about our money immediately upon meeting Mr. Miller, we
may offend a man from whom we might have profited finan-
cially, morally, or spiritually, or we may fail to notice his
attempts to flirt with our wife — that is, we shall act with com-
plete inappropriateness to the actual situation at hand. Mr.
Miller is not identical with our notion of "Jew," whatever
our notion of "Jew" may be. The "Jew," created by inten-
sional definition of the word, simply is not there.

JOHN DOE, THE ^CRIMINAL**

Another instance of the confusion of levels of abstraction
is to be found in cases like this: Let us say that here is a man,
John Doe, who is introduced as one "who has just been re-
leased after three years in the penitentiary." This is already
on a fairly high level of abstraction, but it is nevertheless a
report. From this point, however, many people immediately
and unconsciously climb to still higher levels of abstraction:
"John Doe is an ex-convict . . . he's a criminal!" But the

no LANGUAGE IN ACTION

word "criminal" is not only on a much higher level o£ abstrac-
tion than "the man who spent three years in the penitentiary,"
but it is also, as we have seen before in Chapter 3, a judg-
ment, with the implication, "He has committed a crime in
the past and will probably commit more crimes in future."
The result is that when John Doe applies for a job and is
forced to state that he has spent three years in the penitentiary,
prospective employers, automatically confusing levels of ab-
straction, may say to him, "You can't expect me to give jobs
to criminals!"

John Doe, for all we know from the report, may have
undergone a complete reformation or, for that matter, may
have been unjustly imprisoned in the first place; nevertheless,
he may wander in vain, looking for a job. If, in desperation,
he finally says to himself, "If everybody is going to treat me
like a criminal, I might as well become one," and goes out
and commits a robbery, who is responsible for his act? Yet,
if John Doe gets caught, those who refused to employ him
say, on reading the papers about the robbery, "There, I told
you so! Lucky I didn't hire that criminal!"

The reader is familiar with the way in which rumor grows
as it spreads. Many of the exaggerations of rumor are again
due to this inability on the part of some people to refrain
from climbing to higher levels of abstraction — from reports to
inferences to judgments — and then confusing the levels. Ac-
cording to this kind of "reasoning":

Report. "Mary Smith didn't get in until two last Saturday

night."
Inference. "I bet she was out tearing around!"
Judgment. "She's a worthless hussy. I never did like the looki

of her. I knew it the moment I first laid eyes on her."

Basing our actions towards our fellow human beings on such
hastily abstracted judgments, it is no wonder that we fre-

LITTLE MAN WHO WASN T THERE III

quently make life miserable not only for others, but for our-
selves.

As a final example of this type of confusion, notice the differ-
ence between what happens when a man says to himself, "I
have failed three times," and what happens when he says, "I
am a failure!" It is the difference between sanity and self-
destruction.

DELUSIONAL WORLDS

Consciousness of abstracting prepares us in advance for the
fact that things that look alike are not alike, for the fact that
things that have the same name are not the same, for the
fact that judgments are not reports. In short, it prevents us
from acting like fools. Without consciousness of abstracting —
or rather, without the habit of delaying reactions, which is the
product of a deep awareness that seeing is not believing — we
are completely unprepared for the differences between roses
and paper roses, between the intensional "Jew" and the exten-
sional Mr. Miller, between the intensional "criminal" and the
extensional John Doe.

(Such delayed reactions are a sign of adulthood. It happens,
however, that as the result of miseducation, bad training,
frightening experiences in childhood, obsolete traditional be-
liefs, propaganda, and other influences in our lives, all of us
have what might be termed "areas of insanity" or, perhaps
better, "areas of infantilism." There are certain subjects about
which we can never, as we say, "think straight," because we
are "blinded by prejudice." Some people, for example, as the
result of a childhood experience, cannot help being frightened
by the mere sight of a policeman — any policeman; the terrify-
ing "policeman" inside their heads "is" the extensional police-
man outside, who probably has no designs that anyone could
regard as terrifying. Some people turn pale at the sight of a

112 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

spider — any spider — even a nice, harmless one safely enclosed
in a bottle. Some people automatically become hostile at the
words "un-American," "Nazi," or "communist."

The picture of reality created inside our heads by such un-
consciousness of abstracting is not at all a "map" of any exist-
ing "territory." It is a delusional world. In this never-never
land, all "Jews" are out to cheat you; all "capitalists" are over-
fed tyrants, smoking expensive cigars and gnashing their
teeth at labor unions; all "WPA workers" idly "lean on
shovels," meanwhile "hving on the fat of the land." In this
world, too, all snakes are poisonous, automobiles can be disci-
plined by a well-directed sock in the eye, and every stranger
with a foreign accent is a spy. Some of these people who spend
too much of their time in such delusional worlds eventually
get locked up, but, needless to say, there are many of us still
at large.

How do we reduce such areas of infantilism in our
thought? One way is to know deeply that there is no "neces-
sary connection" between words and what they stand for. For
this reason, the study of a foreign language is always good
for us, even if it has no other uses. Other ways have already
been suggested: to be aware of the process of abstracting and
to realize fully that words never "say all" about anything.
The abstraction ladder — an adaptation of a diagram originated
by Alfred Korzybski to illustrate visually the relationship be-
tween words, "objects," and events — is designed to help us
understand and remain conscious of the process of abstracting.
It should be looked at often. In its original form, made out of
pieces of wood joined with string so that it can be felt as
well as seen, it is used today by some psychiatrists in the treat-
ment of many types of maladjustment and insanity.

LITTLE MAN WHO WASN T THERE II3

APPLICATIONS

The reader who wishes practice in analyzing the disordered
reactions described in this book is urged to make for himself
a collection of "case histories" in which he describes and
attempts to find the source of the mental blockages involved.
He will probably find no lack of examples among his own
acquaintance, as well as among speakers, writers, and other
people in public life. He may even, it might be added, find
some in himself.

. CLASSIFICATIONS

For of course the true meaning of a term is to be
found by observing what a man does with it, not
by what he says about it.

V. W. BRIDGMAN

GIVING THINGS NAMES

THE figure below shows eight objects, let us say animals,
four large and four small, a different four with round
heads and another four with square heads, and still another
four with curly tails and another four with straight tails.
These animals, let us say, are scampering about your village,

"u. ^. o; o:

but since at first they are of no importance to you, you ignore
them. You do not even give them a name.

One day, however, you discover that the little ones eat up
your grain, while the big ones do not. A differentiation sets
itself up, and, abstracting the common characteristics of A,
B, C, and D, you decide to call these go go; E, F, G, and H
you decide to call gigi. You chase away the gogo, but leave
the gigi alone. Your neighbor, however, has had a different
experience; he finds that those with square heads bite, while

114

CLASSIFICATIONS IIJ

those with round heads do not. Abstracting the common
characteristics of B, D, F, and H, he calls them daba, and
A, C, E, and G he calls dobo. Still another neighbor discovers,
on the other hand, that those with curly tails kill snakes, while
those with straight tails do not. He difFerentiates them, ab-
stracting still another set of common characteristics: A, B,
E, and F are btisa, while C, D, G, and H are busana.

Now imagine that the three of you are together when E
runs by. You say, "There goes the gigi"; your first neighbor
says, "There goes the dobo" ; your other neighbor says, "There
goes the busa." Here immediately a great controversy arises.
What is it really, a gigi, a dobo, or a busa? What is its right
name? You are quarreling violently when along comes a
fourth person from another village who calls it a mugloc^,
an edible animal, as opposed to ugloc\, an inedible animal —
which doesn't help matters a bit.

Of course, the question, "What is it really? What is its
right name?" is a nonsense question. By a nonsense question)
is meant one that is not capable of being answered. Things
can have "right names" only if there is a necessary connection
between symbols and things symbolized, and we have seen
that there is not. That is to say, in the light of your interest
in protecting your grain, it may be necessary for you to dis-
tinguish the animal £ as a gigi; your neighbor, who doesn't
like to be bitten, finds it practical to disdnguish it as a dobo;
your other neighbor, who likes to see snakes killed, distin-
guishes it as a busa. What we call things and where we draw
the line between one class of things and another depend upon
the interests we have and the purposes of the classification.
For example, animals are classified in one way by the meat
industry, in a different way by the leather industry, in another
dififerent way by the fur industry, and in a still dififerent way
by the biologist. None of these classifications is any more final
than any of the others; each of them is useful for its purpose.

H6 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

This holds, of course, regarding everything we perceive. A
table "is" a table to us, because we can understand its rela-
tionship to our conduct and interests; we eat at it, work on it,
lay things on it. But to a person living in a culture where no
tables are used, it may be a very big stool, a small platform,
or a meaningless structure. If our culture and upbringing were
different, that is to say, our world would not even look the
same to us.

Many of us, for example, cannot distinguish between
pickerel, pike, salmon, smelts, perch, croppies, halibut, and
mackerel; we say that they are "just fish, and I don't Uke
fish." To a seafood connoisseur, however, these distinctions
are real, since they mean the difference to him between one
kind of good meal, a very different kind of good meal, or a
poor meal. To a zoologist, even finer distinctions become of
great importance, since he has other and more general ends in
view. When we hear the statement, then, "This fish is a speci-
men of the small porgy, Lagodon rhomboides," we accept
this as being "true," even if we don't care, not because that is
its "right name," but because that is how it is classified in the
most complete and most general system of classification which
people most deeply interested in fish have evolved.

When we name something, then, we are classifying. The
individual object or event we are naming, of course, has no
name and belongs to no class until we put it in one. To illus-
trate again, suppose that we were to give the extensional
meaning of the word "Korean." We would have to point to
all "Koreans" living at a particular moment and say, "The
word 'Korean' denotes at the present moment these persons:
Ai, As, As, . . . An." Now, let us say, a child, whom we
shall designate as Z, is born among these "Koreans." The
extensional meaning of the word "Korean',' determined prior
to the existence of Z, does not include Z. Z is a new individual
belonging to no classification, since all classifications were

CLASSIFICATIONS II7

made without taking Z into account. Why, then, is Z also a
"Korean"? Because we say so. And, saying so — fixing the
classification— we have determined to a considerable extent
future attitudes toward Z. For example, Z will always have
certain rights in Korea; he will always be regarded in other
nations as an "alien" and will be subject to laws applicable to
"aHens"; he will never be permitted to enter the U. S. except
under very limited conditions.

In matters of "race" and "nationality," the way in which
classifications work is especially apparent. For example, the
present writer is by "race" a "Japanese," by "nationaHty" a
"Canadian," but, his friends say, "essentially" an "American,"
since he thinks, talks, behaves, and dresses much hke other
Americans. Because he is "Japanese," he is excluded by law
from becoming a citizen of the United States; because he is
"Canadian," he has certain rights in all parts of the British
Empire; because he is "American," he gets along with his
friends and teaches in an American institution of higher
learning without any noticeable special difficulties. Are these
classifications "real"? Of course they are, and the effect that
each of them has upon what he may do and what he may
not do constitutes their "reality."

There was, again, the story some years ago of the immi-
grant baby whose parents were "Czechs" and eligible to enter
the United States by quota. The child, however, because it
was born on what happened to be a "British" ship, was a
"British subject." The quota for Britishers was full for that
year, with the result that the newborn infant was regarded
by immigration authorities as "not admissible to the United
States." How they straightened out this matter, the writer
does not know. The reader can multiply instances of this kind
at will. When, to take another example, is a person a
"Negro"? By the definition accepted in the United States, any
person with even a small amount of "Negro blood"— that is,

Il8 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

whose parents or ancestors were classified as "Negroes" — is a
"Negro." Logically, it would be exactly as justifiable to say
that any person with even a small amount of "white blood"
is "white." Why do they say one rather than the other?
Because the former system o£ classification suits the conven-
ience of those ma\ing the classification.

There are few complexities about classifications at the level
of dogs and cats, knives and forks, cigarettes and candy, but
when it comes to classifications at high levels of abstraction,
for example, those describing conduct, social institutions,
philosophical and moral problems, serious difficulties occur.
When one person kills another, is it an act of murder, an act
of temporary insanity, an act of homicide, an accident, or an
act of heroism ? As soon as the process of classification is com-
pleted, our attitudes and our conduct are to a considerable
degree determined. We hang the murderer, we lock up the
insane man, we free the victim of circumstances, we pin a
medal on the hero.

THE BLOCKED MIND

Unfortunately, people are not always aware of the way in
which they arrive at their classifications. Unaware of the
characteristics of the extensional Mr. Miller not covered by
classifying him as "a Jew" and attributing to Mr. Miller all
the characteristics suggested by the affective connotations of
the term with which he has been classified, they pass final
judgment on Mr. Miller by saying, "Well, a Jew's a Jew.
There's no getting around that!"

We need not concern ourselves here with the injustices
done to "Jews," "Roman Catholics," "Republicans," "WPA
workers," "New Deal proposals," and so on, by such hasty
judgments or, as it is better to call them, signal reactions.
"Hasty judgments" suggests that such errors can be avoided

CLASSIFICATIONS II9

by thinking more slowly; this, of course, is not the case, for
some people think very slowly with no better results. What
we are concerned with is the way in which we block the
development of our own minds by such signal reactions.

To continue with our example of the people who say, "A
Jew's a Jew. There's no getting around that!" — they are, as
we have seen, confusing the denoted, extensional Jew with
the fictitious "Jew" inside their heads. Such persons, the
reader will have observed, can usually be made to admit, on
being reminded of certain "Jews" whom they admire — per-
haps Albert Einstein, perhaps Hank Greenberg, perhaps
Jascha Heifetz, perhaps Benny Goodman — that "there are ex-
ceptions, of course." They have been compelled by experi-
ence, that is to say, to take cognizance of at least a few of the
multitude of "Jews" who do not fit their preconceptions. At
this point, however, they continue triumphantly, "But excep-
tions only prove the rule!"^ — which is another way of saying,
"Facts don't count." In extremely serious cases of people who
"think" in this way, it can sometimes be observed that the
best friends they have may be Isaac Cohens, Isidor Ginsbergs,
and Abe Sinaikos; nevertheless, in explaining this, they will
say, "I don't think of them as Jews at all. They're just friends."
In other words, the fictitious "Jew" inside their heads remains
unchanged in spite of their experience.

People like this cannot learn from experience. They con-
tinue to vote "Republican" or "Democratic," no matter what
the Republicans or Democrats do. They continue to object to
"socialists," no matter what the socialists propose. They con-
tinue to regard "mothers" as sacred, no matter which mother.
A woman who had been given up both by physicians and
psychiatrists as hopelessly insane was being considered by a

^ This extraordinarily fatuous saying originally meant, "The exception
tests the rule" — "Exceptio probat regulam." This older meaning of the word
"prove" survives in such an expression as "automobile proving ground," for
testing automobiles.

I20 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

committee whose task it was to decide whether or not she
should be committed to an asylum. One member of the com-
mittee doggedly refused to vote for commitment. "Gentle-
men," he said in tones of deepest reverence, "you must re-
member that this woman is, after all, a mother." Similarly
such people continue to hate "Protestants," no matter which
Protestant. Unaware of characteristics left out in the process
of classification, they overlook, when the term "Republican"
is applied to both the party of Abraham Lincoln and the party
of Warren Harding, the rather important differences between
them: "If the Republican party was good enough for Abe
Lincoln, it's good enough for me!"

COWi IS NOT COW2

How do we prevent ourselves from getting into such intel-
lectual blind alleys, or, finding we are in one, how do we get
out again? One way is to remember that practically all state-
ments in ordinary conversation, debate, and public contro-
versy taking the form, "Jews are Jews," "Republicans are Re-
pubhcans," "Business is business," "Boys will be boys,"
"Woman drivers are woman drivers," and so on, are not true.
Let us put one of these back into a context in Ufe.

"I don't think we should go through with this deal, Bill. Is it
altogether fair to the railroad company?"

"Aw, forget it! Business is business, after all."

Such an assertion, although it looks like a "simple statement
of fact," is not simple and is not a statement of fact. The first
"business" denotes the transaction under discussion; the
second "business" invokes the connotations of the word. The
sentence says, therefore, "Let us treat this transaction with
complete disregard for considerations of honor, sentiment, or
justice, as the word 'business' suggests." Similarly, when a

CLASSIFICATIONS 121

father tries to excuse the mischief done by his sons, he says,
"Boys will be boys"; in other words, "Let us regard the actions
of my sons with that indulgent amusement customarily ex-
tended toward those whom we call 'boys,' " though the angry
neighbor will say, of course, "Boys, my eye! They're little
hoodlums; that's what they are!" These are not informative
statements but directives, directing us to classify the object
or event under discussion in given ways, in order that we
may feel or act in the ways suggested by the terms of the
classification.

There is a simple technique for preventing such directives
from having their harmful effect on our thinking. It is the
suggestion made by Korzybs\i that we add "index numbers"
to our terms, thus: Englishman^ Englishmanz . . . ; cow^^
COW2, cowz . . . ; Frenchman-i, Frenchman^-, Frenchman^
. . . ; communist^, communists, communists • • • The terms
of the classification tell us what the individuals in that class
have in common; the index numbers remind us of the
CHARACTERISTICS LEFT OUT. A rule Can then be formulated as a
general guide in all our thin/(ing and reading: Cow^ is not
cowz', Jewi IS NOT Jewz', politiciani is not politicians, and so
on. This rule, if remembered, prevents us from confusing
levels of abstraction and forces us to consider the facts on
those occasions when we might otherwise find ourselves leap-
ing to conclusions which we may later have cause to regret.

"truth*'

Most intellectual problems are, ultimately, problems of
classification and nomenclature. There is a debate still going
on at the present time between the American Medical Asso-
ciation and the Anti-Trust Division of the Department of
Justice as to whether the practice of medicine is a "profession"
or "trade." The American Medical Association wants im-

122 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

munity from laws prohibiting the "restraint of trade"; there-
fore, it insists that medicine is a "profession." The Anti-Trust
Division wants to stop certain economic practices connected
with the practice of medicine, and therefore it insists that
medicine is a "trade." Partisans of either side will accuse the
other of "perverting the meanings of words" and of "not
being able to understand plain English." Who is right }

The usual way in which such questions are settled is by
appeals to etymological dictionaries to discover the "real
meanings" of the words "trade" and "profession," by consul-
tation of past legal decisions and learned treatises of various
kinds. The decision finally rests, however, not upon appeals
to past authority, but upon what society wants. If it wants the
A.M.A. to be immune from anti-trust prosecution, it will
finally get the Supreme Court to "define" medicine as a "pro-
fession." If it wants the A.M.A. prosecuted, it will get a de-
cision that medicine is a "trade." In either case society will
get the decision it wants, even if it has to wait until the
present members of the Supreme Court are dead and an en-
tirely new court is appointed. When the desired decision is
handed down, people will say, "Truth has triumphed." So-
ciety, in short, regards as "true" those systems of classification
that produce the desired results.

The scientific test of "truth," like the social test, is strictly
practical, except for the fact that the "desired results" are more
severely limited. The results desired by society may be irra-
tional, superstitious, selfish, or humane, but the results desired
by scientists are only that our systems of classification produce
predictable results. Classifications, as has already been indi-
cated, determine our attitudes and behavior toward the object
or event classified. When lightning was classified as "evidence
of divine wrath," no courses of action other than prayer were
suggested to prevent one's being struck by lightning. As soon,
however, as it was classified as "electricity," Benjamin Frank-

CLASSIFICATIONS 1 23

lin achieved a measure of control over it by his invention of
the lightning rod. Certain physical disorders were formerly
classified as "demonic possession," and this suggested that we
"drive the demons out" by whatever spells or incantations
we could think of. The results were uncertain. But when those
disorders were classified as "bacillus infections," courses of
action were suggested that led to more predictable results.
Science seeks only the most generally useful systems of classi-
fication; these it regards for the time being, until more useful
classifications are invented, as "true."

APPLICATIONS

I. The applications of this chapter are so numerous that it
is possible here only to suggest a few.

a. What IS meant when someone says, "What people ordinarily
call rabbits are really hares, and what they call hares are really
rabbits" ?

b. What takes place when a judge renders a decision that a given
firm is or is not "engaged in interstate commerce"? Is a "cor-
poration" a "person," or isn't it?

c. What is the difference between a "Pullman porter" and an
"airline hostess" (i) from the point of view of services per-
formed, and (2) from the point of view of social status? And
why the difference?

d. What differences in criminological theory are implied when a
place to put social offenders is called (i) a prison, (2) a re-
formatory, and (3) an institute for social rehabilitation, and
what are the resulting differences in such matters as the choice
of staff, the treatment of inmates, the design, furniture, and
arrangement of the buildings and grounds?

e. When is an athlete an "amateur"?

f. What is the difference between "relief" and "social insurance"?

g. Is Britain (March, 1941) a "democracy," or is she not — and
what follows from the answer we give to this question?

1/14 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

b We are sometimes told that the problems of the world are
"economic," sometimes that they are "political," and some-
times that they are "spiritual." What do people mean by such
statements ?

2. Another subject to be considered in the light of our study
of classifications is humor. Is not much of humor the result
of changing accustomed classifications so that things appear
in unexpected lights.?

I loved thee beautiful and kind,
And plighted an eternal vow:
So altered are thy face and mind,
'Twere perjury to love thee now!

ROBERT, EARL NUGENT
(1702-1788)

Would this, then, be the reason that people who see things
only in their accustomed classifications are usually looked
upon as dull, and that people with "single-track minds," who
see life in terms of one dominating interest, are usually said
to lack a sense of humor.?

Many other applications, in science, in ethics, in law, in
business, and in everyday life, will suggest themselves to the
thoughtful reader.

THE TWO-VALUED
ORIENTATION

And the admired art of disputing hath added much
to the natural imperfection of languages. . . .
This is unavoidably to be so where men's parts
and learning are estimated by their skill in dis-
puting. And if reputation and reward shall attend
these conquests . . . 'tis no wonder if the wit of
man so employed should perplex, involve, and sub-
tilize the signification of sounds; so as never to
want something to say in opposing or defending
any question — the victory being adjudged not to
him who had truth on his side, but the last tvord
in the dispute.

JOHN LOCKE

IN such an expression as "We must listen to both sides of
every question," there is an assumption, frequently un-
examined, that every question has, fundamentally, only two
sides. We tend to think in opposites, to feel that what is not
"good" must be "bad" and that what is not "bad" must be
"good." This feeling is heightened when we are excited or
angry. During war times, for example, it is often felt that
whoever is not a. "lOO per cent patriot" must be a "foreign
agent." Children manifest this same tendency. When they are
taught English history, for example, the first thing they want
to know about every ruler is whether he was a "good king"
or a "bad king." In popular literature and movie scenarios
written for childish mentalities, there are always "heroes" on
the one hand, to be cheered, and "villains" on the other, to be
hissed. Much popular political thought is based upon the op-

125

126 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

position of "Americanism" (whatever that may mean) against
"foreign -isms" (whatever that may mean). This tendency
to see things in terms of two values only, affirmative and
negative, good and bad, hot and cold, love and hate, may be
termed the two-valued orientation.

THE TWO-VALUED ORIENTATION
AND COMBAT

Now, in terms of a single desire, there are only two values,
roughly speaking: things that gratify or things that frustrate
that desire. If we are starving, there are only two kinds of
things in the world so far as we are concerned at the moment :
edible things and inedible things. If we are in danger, there
are the things that we fear and the things that may help and
protect us. At primitive levels of existence, in our absorption
in self-defense or food-seeking, there are, in terms of those
limited desires, only two categories possible: things that give
us pain and things that give us pleasure. Life at such levels
can be folded neatly down the middle, with all good on one
side, all bad on the other, and everything is accounted for,
because things that are irrelevant to our interests escape our
notice altogether.

When we are fighting, moreover, we are reduced at once to
such a two-valued orientation. For the time being, nothing
in the world exists except ourselves and our opponent. Dinner
tomorrow, the beauties of the landscape, the interested by-
standers— all are forgotten. We fight, therefore, with all the
intensity we are capable of; our muscles are tense, our hearts
beat much faster than usual, our veins swell, and the supply
of white corpuscles in our blood stream increases to take care
of possible damage. Indeed, the two-valued orientation, which
under conditions of great excitement shows as many "physi-

THE TWO-VALUED ORIENTATION 12/

cal" manifestations as "mental," may be regarded as an inevi-
table accompaniment to combat. If we fight, we develop the
two- valued orientation; if we develop the two- valued orien-
tation, we begin to want to fight. Under the influence of the
two-valued orientation, we have in place of our normal re-
actions elaborate sets of signal reactions, lumping together all
evils as one Evil, all good things as one Good.

To savages, whose life is a perpetual fight with the ele-
ments, with enemies, with wild animals, or with hostile spirits
supposed to reside in natural objects, the two-valued orienta-
tion appears to be the normal orientation. Every act of a man's
Hfe in a primitive, superstitious society is strictly governed by
ritual necessity or tabu. There is, as anthropology has shown,
no freedom in savage existence, since strict compulsions about
"good" and "bad" govern every detail of life. One must, for
example, hunt and fish in specified ways with specified cere-
monies in order to achieve success; one must avoid walking
on people's shadows; one must avoid stirring the pot from
right to left instead of from left to right; one must avoid
calHng people by their given names lest the name be over-
heard by evil spirits. A bird flying over the village is either
"good luck" or "bad luck." Nothing is meaningless or acci-
dental to a savage, because everything he sees, if he notices
it at all, must be accounted for under one of the two values.

The trouble with such thought, of course, is that there is
never any way of evaluating any new experience, process, or
object other than by such terms as "good magic" or "bad
magic." Any departure from custom is discouraged on the
ground that it is "unprecedented" and therefore "bad magic."
For this reason, many primitive peoples have apparently static
civiUzations in which each generation duplicates almost ex-
actly the ways of life of previous generations — hence they be-
come what is known as "backward" peoples. They have in

128 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

their language no means of progressing towards new evalua-
tions, since all things are viewed only in terms of two sets
of values/

OPPOSITIONS

But, the objection may arise, doesn't everything have its
opposite: hot and cold, love and hate, life and death, black
and white, sane and insane, thick and thin, clean and dirty?
This objection would be at least plausible if all kinds of
opposition were alike — but they are not. The simplest kind of
opposition is, of course, opposition in terms of a single inter-
est: edible vs. inedible things; we vs. they; Americans vs.
foreigners (everybody else). This kind of opposition may be
illustrated by the following diagram:

^o^'-^ not -A

not-A
not -A

But the opposition between "white" and "black" is another
kind of opposition. White and black are the extreme limits
of a scale, and between them there is a continuous range of
deepening shades of gray:

white'l I 1 1 1 1 1 1 III llllllllimmmiMMMnwilllMlBJ'T>lack:'

1 This is not to say that primitive peoples are "not intelligent." It simply
means that lack of cultural intercommunication has deprived them of the
opportunity to pool their knowledge with other peoples, so that they have
had litde occasion to develop the linguistic machinery which would offer
finer evaluations needed for the accurate pooling of knowledge. Civilized
people, insofar as they are civilized, have advanced not because of superior
native intelligence, but because they have inherited the products of centuries
of widest cultural intercommunication.

THE TWO-VALUED ORIENTATION I29

Again, the oppositions between "hot" and "cold" and between
"up" and "down" are relationships made with reference to a
selected point in a scale:

"just
iri^ht"-

--up^

''neither up
nor down"

*cold" "down"
I

There are also further types of opposition, such as comple-
mentary oppositions, such as the positive and negative of a
photograph or the right and left hands, and directional oppo-
sitions, like east and west, to and fro, coming and going.

East

West

These are, of course, only a few of the types of opposition,
but this is enough to indicate not only the inadequacy of an
orientation based on two values, but also the falsity of treating
all oppositions as if they were alike.

130 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

THE POLITICAL USE OF THE TWO-
VALUED ORIENTATION

The two-valued orientation is most clearly illustrated today
by a regressive tendency now fashionable in the modern world
— the tendency which has achieved its fullest expression in
the Germany of Adolf Hitler. Here, as even a cursory exami-
nation of official Nazi party propaganda shows, the two-
valued orientation is relied upon almost exclusively. Hunger,
famine, unemployment, crooked capitalism, defeat in the first
World War, bad smells, immorality, treachery, selfishness, and
all things offensive are lined up on the "bad" side with
"Jewish-dominated plutocracy." Anyone or anything that
stands in the way of Hitler's wishes is "Jewish," "degenerate,"
"corrupt," "democratic," "internationahst," and, as a crown-
ing insult, "non-Aryan." On the other hand, everything that
Hitler chooses to call "Aryan" is noble, virtuous, heroic, and
altogether glorious. Courage, self-discipline, honor, beauty,
health, and joy are "Aryan." Everything he calls upon people
to do, they are to do "to fulfill their Aryan heritage." In the
light of this two-valued orientation of "Aryanism" vs. "non-
Aryanism," everything is examined and appraised: art, books,
people, philosophies, music, mathematics, physics, dogs, cats,
calisthenics, architecture, morals, cookery, religion. If Hitler
approves, it is "Aryan." If he disapproves, it is "non-Aryan"
or "Jewish-dominated." The absurdity of classifying the Japa-
nese as "Aryan," just because Japan and Germany have
friendly understandings, and President Roosevelt as "Jewish,"
of classifying pointed roofs as "Aryan" and flat roofs as "inter-
national" and therefore "Jewish," or of classifying one branch
of physics as "Aryan" and another as "Jewish," does not in the
least deter Hitler or his propaganda minister.

The connection between the two-valued orientation and

THE. TWO-VALUED ORIENTATION 13I

combat is again apparent in the history of Nazism. From the
very beginning, Hitler kept telUng his followers that they
were "surrounded by enemies." Germany, ever since Hitler
came to power, has been on constant war footing against real
or imagined enemies. Long before the present war started,
everyone, including women and children, was being pressed
into "war" service of one kind or another. In order to keep
the combative sense growing and in order to prevent its
fizzling out for want of tangible enemies before the start of
actual warfare, the German people were kept fighting at
home against alleged "enemies within the gates": the Jews,
most of all, and anybody else who opposed the Nazis in any
way. The brutalities inflicted upon dissenting German citi-
zens, Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant, even in so-called peace
times, show the characteristic war hysteria: the feeling that
nothing is too good for the "good," and nothing is too bad
for the "bad," and that there is no middle ground, "Who-
ever is not for us is against us."

THE MULTI-VALUED ORIENTATION

Except in quarrels and violent controversies, the language
of everyday life shows what may be termed a multi-valued
orientation. We have scales of judgment. Instead of "good"
and "bad," we have "very bad," "bad," "not bad," "fair,"
"good," "very good"; instead of "sane" and "insane," we have
"quite sane," "sane enough," "mildly neurotic," "neurotic,"
"almost psychotic," "psychotic." If we have only two values,
for example, "law-abiding" and "law-breaking," we have only
two ways of acting toward a given legal situation; the former
are freed, and the latter are, let us say, executed. The man who
rushes a traffic Hght is, of course, under such a dispensation,
"just as much a law-breaker as a murderer" and will there-
fore have to get the same punishment. If this seems absurd.

131 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

one has only to recall the medieval heresy trials in which the
"orthodox" were freed and the "heretics" put to death — with
the result that pious men who made slight theological errors
through excess of Christian zeal were burned to as black a
crisp as infidels or desecrators of the church. As soon as addi-
tional distinctions between degrees of offense are established,
additional possibilities are thrown open, so that a minor traffic
violation may mean a one dollar fine; vagrancy, ten days;
smuggling, two to five years in prison; grand larceny, five to
fifteen years — that is, as many degrees of punishment as there
are degrees of guilt recognized.

,^'The greater the number of distinctions, the greater becomes
\the number of courses of action suggested to us. This means
that we become increasingly capable of reacting appropriately
to the many complex situations life presents. The physician
does not lump all people together into the two classes of the
"healthy" and the "ill"; he distinguishes an indefinite number
of conditions that may be described as "illness" and has an
indefinite number of treatments or combinations of treat-
ments. But the primitive witch-doctor did one song and dance
for all illnesses.

The two-valued orientation is an orientation based ulti-
mately, as we have seen, on a single interest. But human
beings have many interests: they want to eat, to sleep, to
have friends, to publish books, to sell real estate, to build
bridges, to listen to music, to maintain peace, to conquer dis-
ease. Some of these desires are stronger than others, and life
presents a perpetual problem of weighing one set of desires
against others and making choices: "I hke having the money,
but I think I would like having that car even better than
having the money." "I'd hke to fire the strikers, but I think
it's more important to obey the laws of the land." "I'd like
to obey the laws, but I think it's more important that those
strikers be taught a lesson." "I don't hke standing in line for

THE TWO-VALUED ORIENTATION I33

tickets, but I do want to see that show." For the weighing
of the various and compHcated desires that civiHzation gives
rise to, an increasingly finely graduated scale of values is neces-
sary, as well as foresight, lest in satisfying one desire we frus-
trate even more important ones. The ability to see things in
terms of more than two values may be referred to as a multi-
valued orientation.

THE MULTI-VALUED ORIENTATION
AND DEMOCRACY

The multi-valued orientation shows itself, of course, in
almost all intelligent and even moderately intelligent public
discussion. The editors of responsible papers, such as the New
York Times, PM, Kansas City Star, Chicago Daily News,
Milwaukee Journal — to name only a few — and the writers for
reputable magazines, such as Fortune, The New Republic,
Common Sense, or Atlantic Monthly have a way of instinc-
tively avoiding the unqualified two-valued orientation. They
may condemn Hitler, but they remind one at the same time
of the external causes that produced Hitlerism and of the
fascistic tendencies in our own nation. They may attack a
political administration, but they do not forget its positive
achievements. They may even recommend war, but they re-
mind us of the hmitations of war as a method of solving
problems. From our point of view here, it does not matter
whether it is from other motives, such as timidity, that they
avoid speaking in terms of angels and devils, pure "good" and
pure "evil." The important thing is that they do, and by so
doing they keep open the possibility of adjusting differences,
reconciling conflicting interests, and arriving at just estimates.
There are people who object to this "shilly-shallying" and in-
sist on "an outright yes or no." They are the Gordian knot
cutters; they may undo the knot, but they ruijti the rope.

134 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

Indeed, many features of the democratic process presuppose
the multi- valued orientation. Even that most ancient of judi-
cial procedures, the trial by jury, restricted to the conclusions
"guilty" and "not guilty," is not as two-valued as it looks,
since in the very selection of the charge to be brought against
the prisoner a choice is made among many possibilities, and
also, in the jury's verdict as well as in the judge's sentence,
guilt is often modified by recognition of "extenuating circum-
stances." Modern administrative tribunals and boards of
mediation, not tied down by the necessity of arriving at clear
verdicts of "guilty" and "not guilty" and empowered to issue
"consent decrees" and to close agreements between litigants,
are even more multf-valued than the trial by jury and there-
fore, for some purposes, considerably more efficient.

To take another example, very few bills ever pass a demo-
cratic parliamentary body in exactly the form in which they
were proposed. Opposing parties argue back and forth, make
bargains and compromises with each other, and by such a
process tend to arrive at decisions that are more exactly ad-
justed to the needs of everyone in the community than the
original proposals. The more fully developed a democracy,
the more flexible become its orientations, and the more fully
does it reconcile the conflicting desires of the people.

Even more multi-valued is the language of science. Instead
of saying "hot" and "cold," we give the temperature in de-
grees on a fixed or agreed-upon scale: — 20° F., 37° C, and
so on. Instead of saying "strong" and "weak," we give
strength in horse-power or voltage; instead of "fast" and
"slow," we give speed in miles per hour or feet per second.
Instead of being limited to two possible answers or even to
several, we have an infinite number when we use these nu-
merical methods. The language of science, therefore, can be
said to offer an infinite-valued orientation. Having at its com-
mand the means to adjust one's action in an infinite number

THE TWO-VALUED ORIENTATION 135

of ways according to the exact situation at hand, science
travels rapidly and gets things done.

THE AFFECTIVE POWER OF THE
TWO-VALUED ORIENTATION

In spite of all that has been said to recommend multi- and
infinite-valued orientation, it must not be overlooked that in
Tthe expression of feelings, the two-valued orientation is almost
unavoidable. There is a profound "emotional" truth in the
two-valued orientation that accounts for its adoption in strong
expressions of feeling, especially those that call for sympathy,
pity, or help in a struggle. "Down with slums and up with
better housing." "A ship ticket now is a passage to life!
Thousands of stanch anti-fascists face death this winter from
disease and starvation." The more spirited the expression,
indeed, the more sharply will things be dichotomized into the
"good" and the "bad."

As an expression of feeling and therefore as an affective
element in speaking and writing, the two-valued orientation
almost always appears. It is hardly possible to express strong
feelings or to arouse the interest of an apathetic listener with-
out conveying to some extent this sense of conflict. Everyone
who is trying to promote a cause, therefore, shows the two-
valued orientation somewhere in the course of his writing.
It will be found, however, that the two-valued orientation is
qualified in all conscientious attempts at presenting what is
believed to be truth — qualified sometimes, in the ways ex-
plained above, by pointing out what can be said against the
"good" and what can be said for the "bad" — qualified at
other times by the introduction, elsewhere in the text, of a
multi-valued approach to the problems.

The two-valued orientation, in short, can be compared to
a paddle, which performs the functions, in primitive methods

136 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

of navigation, both of starter and steering apparatus. In civi-
lized life the two-valued orientation may be the starter, since
it arouses our interest with its aflfective power, but the multi-
valued or infinite-valued orientation is our steering apparatus
that directs us to our destination.

"the HYDROSTATIC PARADOX OF

controversy"

One of the principal points at which the two-valued orienta-
tion can seriously upset our thinking is in controversy. If one
of the debaters has a two-valued orientation which leads him
to feel that the New Deal, for example, is "entirely good"
and the Republicans "entirely bad," he unconsciously forces
his opponent into the position of maintaining that the New
Deal is "entirely bad" and the Republicans "entirely good."
If vit argue with such a person at all, there is hardly any way
to escape being put into a position as extreme on one side as
his is on the other. This fact was well stated by Oliver
Wendell Holmes in his Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table,
where he speaks of "the hydrostatic paradox of controversy":

Don't you know what that means? — Well, I will tell you. You
know that, if you had a bent tube, one arm of which was of the
size of a pipe-stem, and the other big enough to hold the ocean,
water would stand at the same height in one as in the other.
Controversy equalizes fools and wise men in the same way — and
the fools hnow it.

Disputes in which this "equalization" is likely to occur are,
of course, a waste of time. The reductio ad absurdum of this
kind of discussion is often to be found in the high school and
college "debate," as still practiced in many localities. Since
both the "affirmative" and "negative" can do little other than
exaggerate their own claims and belittle the claims of the

THE TWO-VALUED ORIENTATION I37

opposition, the net intellectual result of such encounters is
usually almost negligible, and decisions as to who "won" the
debate must be made on such irrelevant points as skill of
presentation and the pleasing personalities of the contest-
ants. Parhaments and congresses, it will be observed, do not
try to conduct much of their serious discussion on the floor.
Speeches are made principally for the constituents back home
and not for the other legislators. The main work of govern-
ment is done in the committee room, where the traditional
atmosphere of debate is absent. Freed from the necessity of
standing resolutely on "affirmative" or "negative" positions,
legislators in committee are able to thresh out problems, in-
vestigate facts, and arrive at workable conclusions that repre-
sent positions in between the possible extremes. It would seem
that in training students to become citizens in a democracy,
practice in sitting on and testifying before committees of in-
quiry would be more suitable than debating, after the fashion
of medieval school-men, for "victory."

THE TWO-VALUED ORIENTATION
AND THE MOB SPIRIT

The use of the two-valued orientation in political and social
discussion is not confined, of course, to Hitler. It is customary
for all those whom we call "spread-eagle orators" and "dema-
gogues" to rely upon it as their principal argumentative tech-
nique. As in Germany, it produces here the results of intoxi-
cation, fanaticism, and brutality. "What do they care," roars
an orator of this kind, "those international bankers and great
corporate warmongers, their fellow conspirators, the atheistic
Jews and communists," and their hireling poHticians and edi-
tors— what do they care in their insatiable lust for power for
the right of the workingman to the fruits of his labor, the
right of a farmer to a decent living on the soil he tills, and

138 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

the right of the small businessman to the modest rewards of
his enterprise? We have been long-suilering. We have been
patient. But the time has come when we must put a stop to
these forces of international anarchy! The time has come for
Americans to arise!" Listeners who uncritically permit them-
selves to be carried away by such oratory week after week
almost invariably find their pulses rising, their fists clenching,
and the desire to act violently accumulating within them.

This, of course, is what changes a peaceful assembly into
a mob. It must be admitted, however, that the speaker can-
not be held entirely to blame, since the tendency towards the
two-valued orientation must exist in the listeners prior to the
haranguing. The internal disturbance produced by such
speeches is so great that an outlet must be found in some
kind of activity. If, therefore, people in this condition are not
restrained by the police, they are as likely as not to start riot-
ing in the streets, throwing bricks in shop windows, and
beating up strangers. Such intoxications are also responsible
for lynching bees. Every kind of cruelty is inflicted upon
anyone suspected of being on the "bad" side.

Accompanying such conduct, and indeed enabling it, is a
tremendous sense of self-righteousness. People in whom a
strict two-valued orientation has been inculcated ordinarily
have no compunctions about any of the brutalities they com-
mit, because they feel that "the dirty rats have it coming to
them." They come to believe themselves to be instruments
of divine justice. To be able to satisfy one's most primitive
blood lusts and to be able at the same time to regard oneself
as an instrument of justice is a rare combination of pleasures.
Those who succumb frequently to this form of self-indulgence
are likely, therefore, to become incurably addicted to brutality,
as SS Guards are said to be in Germany and some policemen
are said to be in this country.

Intoxications of this kind usually have alleged religious or

THE TWO-VALUED ORIENTATION I39

patriotic motives. Sometimes the excuse for them is "the main-
tenance of law and order." The principal objection to them
from a practical point of view is that they notoriously fail to
achieve their objectives. The mobs that descend upon dissent-
ing pacifistic or religious groups in order to compel them by
force to kiss the flag do not advance the cause of national
defense, but weaken it by creating burning resentments
among those minorities. Southern lynch mobs do not solve
the Negro problem; they simply make it worse. In short, the
two-valued orientation produces the combative spirit, but
nothing else. When guided by it for any purpose other than
fighting, we practically always achieve results opposite from
those intended.

Nevertheless, some orators and editorial writers employ the
crude, unqualified two-valued orientation with extraordinary
frequency, although in the alleged interests of peace, pros-
perity, good government, and other laudable aims. Do such
writers and speakers do this because they know no better?
Or are they so contemptuous of their audiences that they feel
that a qualified statement such as "The opposition party's
good points are outweighed by its bad points" would be too
subtle for the public's comprehension? Another possibility is
that they are sincere; they cannot help having signal reactions
whenever certain hated subjects come into their minds. A final
possibility, even less pleasant to think about, is that some of
them are deliberately trying, under the cover of laudable ob-
jectives, to produce unrest, hatred, confusion, and civil dis-
obedience, for obscure purposes of their own.

APPLICATIONS

The two-valued orientation appears in each of the follow-
ing passages, in crude form (accompanied by confusion of
levels of abstraction), as well as at higher levels of feeling;

I40 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

qualified as well as unqualified. Analyze each of them care-
fully, especially in the hght of the questions: "How much
confidence can I safely repose in the judgment of the author
of this passage? A great deal? None at all? Or is there not
enough evidence to be able to say?" Be on guard against the
assumption that the two-valued orientation is always a "bad"
thing.

1. "Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the
ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the
seat of the scornful. But his delight is in the law of the Lord;
and in his law doth he meditate day and night. And he shall be
like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his
fruit in season; his leaf also shall not wither; and whatsoever he
doeth shall prosper.

"The ungodly are not so: but are like the chaff which the
wind driveth away. Therefore the ungodly shall not stand in the
judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous.

"For the Lord knoweth the way of the righteous: but the way
of the ungodly shall perish." — Psalms i.

2. "I warn John L. Lewis and his communistic cohorts that no
second carpetbag expedition into the Southland, under the Red
banner of Soviet Russia and concealed under the slogans of the
CIO, will be tolerated. If the minions of the CIO attempt to
carry through the South their lawless plan of organization, if
they attempt to demoralize our industry, to corrupt our colored
citizens, to incite race hatreds and race warfare, I warn him here
and now that they will be met by the flower of Southern man-
hood and they will reap the bitter fruits of their folly." [Quota-
tion from Representative E. E. Cox of Georgia.]

STUART CHASE, The Tyranny of Words.

■^^ 3. "As a way of life democracy has now become synonymous
with civilization: it is democracy, rather than communism, that
is the real alternative to fascist barbarism. Evils of all sorts exist
in democratic countries: exhibitions of arbitrary power, class ex-
ploitation, local outbreaks of collective sadism. . . . But, unlike

THE TWO-VALUED ORIENTATION 14I

fascism, democracy is not based upon the existence of these evils;
nor does it exult in them and proclaim them to be the new
virtues.

"So it comes to this. There is nothing that civilized men any-
where have developed and cherished that a democratic polity, as
such, rejects: rather, it gives free play to all the forces and insti-
tutions and ideas that have led to the humanization of man: if
fascism has contributed anything to the sum total of human
knowledge or human development, democracy must be ready to
include these lessons in its own synthesis.

"Fascism, on the other hand, distrusts civilization as such:
under the impact of its monstrous collective demonism, it de-
liberately, as a necessary part of its mechanism of defense, tram-
ples upon the humaner virtues."

LEWIS MUMFORD, Men Must Act.

4. Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones
Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold;
Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old,
When all our fathers worshiped stocks and stones,
Forget not: in thy book record their groans
Who were thy sheep, and in their ancient fold
Slain by the bloody Piemontese, that rolled
Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans
The vales redoubled to the hills, and they
To heaven. Their martyred blood and ashes sow
O'er all the Italian fields, where still doth sway
The triple Tyrant; that from these may grow
A hundredfold, who, having learnt thy way.
Early may fly the Babylonian woe.

JOHN MILTON, "On the Late Massacre
in Piedmont"

AFFECTIVE

COMMUNICATION

What I call the "auditory imagination" is the feel-
ing for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below
the conscious levels of thought and feeling, in-
vigorating every word; sinking to the most primi-
tive and forgotten, returning to the origin and
bringing something back, seeking the beginning
and the end. It works through meanings, certainly,
or not without meanings in the ordinary sense, and
fuses the old and obliterated and the trite, the cur-
rent, and the new and surprising, the most ancient
and the most civilised mentality.

T. S. ELIOT

The devices of poetry are more than the devices of
decoration, they are the devices of pressure.

JOSEPHINE MILES

THE language of science, as we have seen, is instrumental
ill getting done the work necessary for life, but it does
not tell us anything about what life feels like in the living.
We can communicate scientific facts to each other without
knowing or caring about each other's feelings; but before love,)
friendship, and community can be established among men so)
that we want to co-operate and become a society, there must]
be a flow of sympathy between one man and another. This''
flow of sympathy is established, of course, by means of the
affective uses of language. Most of the time, after all, we
are not interested in keeping our feelings out of our discourse,
but rather we are eager to express them as fully as we can.

142

AFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION I43

Let us examine, then, some more of the ways in which lan-
guage can be made to work affectively.

VERBAL HYPNOTISM

First, it should be pointed out again that fine-sounding
speeches, long words, and the general air of saying some-
thing important are affective in result, regardless of what is
being said. Often when we are hearing or reading impres-
sively worded sermons, speeches, political addresses, essays, or
"fine writing," we stop being critical altogether, and simply
allow ourselves to feel as excited, sad, joyous, or angry as the
author wishes us to feel. Like snakes under the influence of
a snake charmer's flute, we are swayed by the musical phrases
of the verbal hypnotist. If the author is a man to be trusted,
there is no reason why we should not enjoy ourselves in this
way now and then. But to listen or read in this way habitually
is a debilitating habit. There is a kind of churchgoer who
habitually listens in this way, however. He enjoys any sermon,
no matter what the moral principles recommended, no matter
how poorly organized or developed, no matter how shabby
its rhetoric, so long as it is delivered in an impressive tone
of voice with proper, i.e. customary, musical and physical
settings. Such listeners are by no means to be found only in
churches. The writer has frequently gnashed his teeth in rage
v/hen, after he has spoken before women's clubs on prob-
lems about which he wished to arouse thoughtful discussion,
certain ladies have remarked, "That was such a lovely address,
professor. You have such a nice voice." Some people, that is,
never listen to what is being said, since they are interested
only in what might be called the gentle inward massage that
the sound of words gives them. Just as cats and dogs like to
be stroked, so do some human beings like to be verbally
stroked at fairly regular intervals; it is a form of rudimentary

144 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

sensual gratification. Because listeners of this kind are numer-
ous, intellectual shortcomings are rarely a barrier to a suc-
cessful career in public life, on the stage or radio, on the lec-
ture platform, or in the ministry.

MORE AFFECTIVE ELEMENTS

The affective power of repetition of similar sounds, as in
"catchy" titles and slogans {The Mind in the Ma\ing, Live
Alone and LiJ^e It, Roosevelt or Ruin) has already been men-
tioned. Somewhat higher on the scale are repetitions not only
of sounds but of grammatical structures, as in:

First in war,

first in peace,

first in the hearts of his countrymen . . .

Government of the people,
by the people,
for the people . . .

Elements of discourse such as these are, from the point of
view of scientific reporting, extraneous; but without them,
these phrases would not have impressed people. Lincoln could
have signified just as much for scientific purposes had he said
"government of, by, and for the people," or, even more simply,
"a people's government." But he was not writing a scientific
monograph. He hammers the word "people" at us three times,
and with each apparently unnecessary repetition he arouses
deeper and more affecting connotations of the word. It is im-
possible in a rapid survey to discuss in detail the complexities
of the affective qualities of language that reside in sound
alone, but it is important to remember that many of the attrac-
tions of literature and oratory have a simple phonetic basis —
rhyme, alliteration, assonance, crossed alliteration, and all the

AFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION I45

subtleties of rhythm. All these sound effects are used to rein-
force wherever possible the other affective devices.

Another affective device is the direct address to the listener
or reader, as: "Keep off the grass. This means you!" The
most painful example of this is Jimmie Fidler's "And I do
mean you." It seeks to engage the Hstener's attention and
interest by making him feel that he personally is being ad-
dressed. But the use of this device is by no means limited to
the advertising poster and radio announcer. It softens the im-
personality of formal speeches and adds what is called the
"personal touch." When a speaker or writer feels a special
urgency about his message, he can hardly help using it. It
occurs, therefore, in the finest rhetoric as well as in the sim-
plest. Almost as common as the "you" device is the "we"
device. The writer in this case allies the reader with himself,
in order to carry the reader along with him in seeing things
as he does: "We shall now consider next . . ." "Let us take,
for example . . ." "Our duty is to go forward . . ." This
device is particularly common in the politer forms of exhorta-
tion used by preachers and teachers and is found throughout
this book.

In such rhetorical devices as the periodic sentence, there is
distortion of grammatical order for affective purposes. A
periodic sentence is one in which the completion of the
thought is, for the sake of the slight dramatic effect that can
be produced by keeping the reader in suspense for a while,
delayed. Then there are such devices as antithesis, a mild
form of two-valued orientation — which is, as will be remem-
bered, profoundly affective. In the antithesis, strongly opposed
notions are placed close together or even laid side by side in
parallel phonetic or grammatical constructions, so that the
reader feels the contrast and is stirred by it: "Born a serf,
he died a king." "The sweetest songs are those that tell of

146 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

saddest thought." "The hungry judges soon the sentence sign,
And wretches hang that jurymen may dine."

METAPHOR AND SIMILE

As we have seen, words have affective connotations in addi-
tion to their informative value, and this accounts for the fact
that statements of this kind: "I've been waiting ages for you
—you're an hour overdue!" "He's got tons of money!" "I'm
so tired I'm simply dead!"— which are nonsensical if inter-
preted literally— nevertheless "make sense." The inaccuracy
or inappropriateness of the informative connotations of our
words are irrelevant from the point of view of affective com-
munication. Therefore we may refer to the moon as "a piece
of cheese," "a lady," "a silver ship," "a fragment of angry
candy," or anything else, so long as the words arouse the
desired feelings toward the moon or toward the whole situa-
tion in which the moon appears. This, incidentally, is the
reason literature is so difficult to translate from one language
to another— a translation that follows informative connota-
tions will often falsify the affective connotations, and vice
versa, so that readers who know both the language of the
original and the language of the translation are almost sure
to be dissatisfied, feeling either that "the spirit of the original
has been sacrificed" or else that the translation is "full of in-
accuracies."

During the long time in which metaphor and simile were
regarded as "ornaments" of speech— that is, as if they were
like embroidery, which improves the appearance of our linen
but adds nothing to its utility— the psychology of such com-
municative devices was neglected. We have seen that as the
result of what we have termed "confusion of levels of abstrac-
tion," we tend to assume that things that create in us the
same responses are identical with each other. Let us say then,

AFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION I47

for example, that we are revolted by the conduct of an ac-
quaintance at dinner and that we have had such a sense of
revulsion before only when watching pigs at a trough. Our
first, unreflecting reaction under such circumstances is natu-
rally to say, "He is a pig." So far as our feelings are con-
cerned, the man and the pig are identical with each other.
Again, the soft winds of spring may produce in us agreeable
sensations; the soft hands of lovely young girls also produce
agreeable sensations; therefore, from the point of view of one
expressing his feelings, "Spring has soft hands." This is the
basic process by which we arrive at metaphor. Metaphors are
not "ornaments of discourse"; they are direct expressions of
feeling and are bound to occur whenever we have strong
feelings to express. They are to be found in special abun-
dance, therefore, in all primitive speech, in folk speech, in the
speech of the unlearned, in the speech of children, and in the
professional argot of the theater, of gangsters, and other Uvely
occupations.

SIMILE

However, even at early stages of civiUzation it must have
been apparent that calUng a person a pig did not take suffi-
ciently into consideration the differences between the person
and the pig. Further reflection compels one to say, in modi-
fication of the original statement, "He is li\e a pig." Such
an expression is called a simile — the pointing out of the simi-
larities in our feelings towards the person and the pig. But it
is important to notice the fact that the very notion of simi-
larity implies the consciousness of differences, while at the
earlier metaphor stage the pig and the person are identified.
The simile, then, is something of a compromise stage between
the direct, unreflective expression of feeling and the report,
but of course closer to the former than to the latter.

148 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

Adequate recognition has never been given to the fact that
what we call "slang" and "vulgarism" works on exactly the
same principles as "great poetry" does. Slang makes constant
use of metaphor and simile: "sticking his neck out," "to
rubberneck," "out like a light," "baloney," "licorice stick"
(clarinet), "punch-drunk," "weasel puss," "keep your shirt
on." The imaginative process by which phrases such as these
are coined is the same as that by which poets arrive at poetry.
In poetry, there is the same love of seeing things in scien-
tifically outrageous but emotionally expressive language:

The hunched camels of the night

Trouble the bright

And silver waters of the moon.

FRANCIS THOMPSON

The snow doesn't give a soft white
damn Whom it touches.

E. E.'CUMMINGS

. . . the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,
Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes. shelley

Sweet are the uses of adversity,

Which like the toad, ugly and venomous.

Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;

And this our life exempt from public haunt.

Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brook,

Sermons in stones, and good in everything.

SHAKESPEARE

I saw Eternity the other night

Like a great ring of pure and endless light.

VAUGHAN

What is called "slang," therefore, might well be regarded as
the poetry of everyday life, since it performs much the same

AFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION I49

function as poetry; that is, it vividly expresses people's feelings
about life and about the things they encounter in life.

PERSONIFICATION

The reader is asked to recall the man in Chapter 9 who
punched his car in the "eye." It will also be recalled that, to a
limited extent, we all do something similar to this. So far as
our feelings are concerned, there is no distinction between
animate and inanimate objects. Our fright feels the same
whether it is a creature or object that we fear. Therefore, in
diie expression of our feelings, a car may "lie down and die,"
the wind "kisses" our cheeks, the waves are "angry" and
"roar" against the cliffs, the roads are icy and "treacherous,"
the mountains "look down" on the sea, machine guns "spit,"
revolvers "bark," volcanoes "vomit" fire, and the engine
"gobbles" coal. This special kind of metaphor is called per-
sonification and is ordinarily described in textbooks of rhetoric
as "making animate things out of inanimate." It is better
understood, however, if we describe it as not distinguishing
between the animate and the inanimate.

DEAD METAPHOR

No implication is intended, however, that because meta-
phor, simile, and personification are based ultimately upon
primitive habits of thought they are to be avoided. On the
contrary, they are among the most useful communicative de-
vices we have, because by their quick affective power they
often make unnecessary the inventing of new words for new
things or new feelings. They are so commonly used for this
purpose, indeed, that we resort to them constantly without
realizing that we are doing so. For example, when we talk
about the "head" of a cane, the "face" of a cliff, the "bowels"

150 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

of a volcano, the "arm" of the sea, the "hands" of a watch,
the "branches" of a river or an insurance company, v^^e are
using metaphor. A salesman "covers" an area; an engine
"knocks"; a theory is "built up" and then "knocked down";
a government "drains" the taxpayers, and corporations "milk"
the consumers. Even in so unpoetical a source as the financial
page of a newspaper, metaphors are to be found: stock is
"watered," shares are "liquidated," prices are "slashed" or
"stepped up," markets are "flooded," the market is "bullish";
in spite of government efforts to "hamstring" business and
"strangle" enterprise, there are sometimes "melons" to be
"sliced"; although this is— but here we leave the financial
page — "pure gravy" for some, others are left "holding the
bag." Metaphors, that is to say, are so useful that they often
pass into the language as part of its regular vocabulary.
Metaphor is probably the most important of all the means
by which language develops, changes, grows, and adapts it-
self to our changing needs. When metaphors are successful,
they "die"— that is, they become so much a part of our regu-
lar language that we cease thinking of them as metaphors
at all.

To object to arguments, as is often done, on the ground
that they are based on metaphors or on "metaphorical think-
ing" is rarely just. The question is not whether metaphors
are used, but whether the metaphors represent valid simi-
larities.

ALLUSION

Still another affective device is allusion. If we say, for ex-
ample, standing on a bridge in St. Paul, Minnesota, in the
early morning:

Earth has not anything to show more fair;
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty . . .

AFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION I5I

we are evoking, in the mind of anyone familiar with the
poem, such feehngs as Wordsworth expressed at the sight of
London in the early morning light in September, 1802, and
applying them to St. Paul. Thus, by a kind of implied simile,
we can give expression to our feelings. Allusion, then, is an
extremely quick way of expressing and also of creating in
our hearers shades of feeling. With a biblical allusion we can
often arouse reverent or pious attitudes; with a historical
allusion, such as saying that New York is "the modern Baby-
lon," we can say quickly and effectively that we feel New
York to be an extremely wicked and luxurious city, doomed
to destruction because of its sinfulness; by a Uterary allusion,
we can evoke the exact feelings found in a given story or
poem as a way of feeling toward the event before us.

But allusions work as an affective device only when the
hearer is familiar with the history, literature, people, or events
alluded to. Family jokes (which are almost always allusions
to events or memories in the family's experience) have to be
explained to outsiders; classical allusions in literature have to
be explained to people not familiar with the classics. Never-
theless, whenever a group of people — the members of a single
family or the members of a whole civilization — have memories
and traditions in common, extremely subtle and efficient
affective communications become possible through the use of
allusion.

One of the reasons, therefore, that the young in every cul-
ture are made to study the literature and history of their own
linguistic or national groups is that they may be able to
understand and share in the communications of the group.
Whoever, for example, fails to understand such statements
as "He is a regular Benedict Arnold," or "The president of
the corporation is only a Charlie McCarthy; the Bergen of
the outfit is the general manager," is in a sense an outsider
to the popular cultural traditions of contemporary America.
Similarly, one who fails to understand passing allusions to

IJ2 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

well-known figures in European or American history, to well-
known lines in Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth,
or the King James version of the Bible, or to well-known
characters in Dickens, Thackeray, or Mark Twain may be said
in the same sense to be an outsider to an important part of
the traditions of English-speaking people. The study of his-
tory and of literature, therefore, is not merely the idle acquisi-
tion of polite accomplishments in order to be able to impress
people, as "practical" men are fond of beUeving, but a neces-
sary means both of increasing the efficiency of our communi-
cations and of increasing our understanding of what odiers
are trying to communicate to us.

IRONY, PATHOS, AND HUMOR

A somewhat more complex device, upon which much of
humor, pathos, and irony depends, is the use of a metaphor,
simile, or allusion that is so obviously inappropriate that a
feeling of conflict is aroused: a conflict between our more
obvious feelings towards that which we are talking about
and the feehngs aroused by the expression. In such a case, the
conflicting feelings resolve themselves into a third, new
feeling. Let us suppose, returning to our example above, that
we are looking at an extremely ugly part of St. Paul, so that
our obvious feelings are those of distaste. Then we arouse,
with the Wordsworth quotation, the feeling of beauty and
majesty. The result is a feeling suggested neither by the sight
of the city alone nor by the allusion alone, but one that is a
product of the conflict of the two— a sharp sense of incon-
gruity that compels us either to laugh or to weep, depending
on the rest of the context. There are many complex shades
of feeling that can hardly be aroused in any other way. If a
village poet is referred to as the "Mudville Milton," for exam-
ple, the conflict between the inglorious connotations of "Mud-

AFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION I53

ville" and the glorious connotations of "Milton" produces an
effect of the ludicrous, so that the poet is exposed to contempt,
although, if Craigenputtock can produce a Carlyle, there is
no reason that Mudville should not produce a Milton. This
somewhat more complex device may be represented graphi-
cally by a diagram borrowed from mathematics:

(Effect of the ludicrous, "Mudville Milton")
^ ^

Line of resultant force: force ^

THE AFFECTI VE N E S S OF FACTS

We have already seen in the discussion of "slanting" that
reports themselves, even if they are not intended to move
the reader, may affect his feelings in one way or another.
Even if we report as coldly and calmly as we can, "Although
no anesthetics or surgical instruments were available, he said
that the leg would have to be amputated. He performed the
operation, therefore, with a butcher knife and a hatchet, while
four men held the patient down," most readers will find such
a report profoundly affective. Facts themselves, that is, are
affective. There is, however, one important difference between
the affectiveness of facts and the other affective elements in
language. In the latter, the writer or speaker is expressing

154 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

his own feelings; in the former, he is "suppressing his feel-
ings"—that is to say, stating things in a way that would be
verifiable, regardless of one's feelings.

Usually, as in the example given, a report with carefully
selected facts is more affective in result than outright and
explicit judgments. Instead of teUing the reader, "It was a
ghastly operation!" we can ma\e the reader say it for him-
self. The reader is, so to speak, made to participate by being
forced to draw his own conclusions. A skillful writer is often,
therefore, one who is particularly expert at selecting the facts
that are sure to move his readers in the desired ways. The
following is a passage from a recent "Profile" in The New
Yorker:

Several endocrinologists have tried vainly to argue Miss D

into submitting to an examination. She is afraid of physicians.
When sick, she depends on patent medicines. "When they get
their hands on a monsterosity the medical profession is too
snoopy," she says.

The facts reported about Miss D , her fear of physicians,

her addiction to patent medicines, the inelegance of her dic-
tion, and her reported mispronunciation of "monstrosity" lead
almost inevitably to the conclusion that she is an ignorant
and unintelligent person; but the writer does not say so. And
we are therefore more likely to be convinced of this con-
clusion by such a passage than by explicit judgments to that
effect because the writer does not ask us to take his word for
it. The conclusion becomes, in a sense, our own discovery
rather than his.

LEVELS OF WRITING

Reliance upon the affectiveness of facts— that is, reliance
upon the reader's ability to arrive at the judgment we want

AFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION I55

him to arrive at — varies considerably, of course, according to
the subject we are deahng with and the audience. When we
say, for example, "His temperature was 105 degrees," prac-
tically any reader can be relied upon to feel, "What a bad
fever!" but when we say, "Mr. Jones's favorite poets were
Edgar Guest and Shakespeare," there are among the possibili-
ties such judgments as these: "How funny! Imagine not being
able to distinguish between Guest's tripe and Shakespeare's
poetry!" and "Mr. Jones must be a nice fellow. They're my
favorites too." Now, if the remark is intended to be a sarcas-
tic comment on Mr. Jones's undiscriminating taste, the sar-
casm will altogether escape those who would give the latter
response. This is what is meant by a remark being "over
people's heads."

In this light, it is interesting to compare magazines and
stories at different levels: the "pulp" and "confession" maga-
zines, the "slicks" (Good Housekeeping, McCaU's, Esquire,
Saturday Evening Post, and so on), and the "quality" maga-
zines {Harper's, The New Yorker, The Nation, for example).
In all but the "quality" magazines, the writers rarely rely on
the reader's ability to arrive at his own conclusions. In order
to save any possible strain on the reader's intelligence, the
writers ma1{e the judgments for us. In this respect there is
httle for us to choose between "pulps" and "sHcks": they
may give us statements in the form of reports, but they almost
invariably accompany them with judgments, to make doubly
and triply sure that the reader gets the point.

In the "quaUty" group, however, the tendency is to rely a
great deal on the reader: to give no judgments at all when
the facts "speak for themselves," or to give enough facts with
every judgment so that the reader is free to make a different
judgment if he so wishes. Passages of this kind, for example,
are not uncommon in "pulps" and "sUcks":

156 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

Elaine was — well, let's put it frankly — a trifle vulgar. She was
pretty, of course, although in an obvious sort of way.

In the "quality" group, the treatment leaves a good deal more
up to the reader:

Elaine dropped her cigarette into the remains of her coflEee. As
she stood up, she gave a couple of tugs at her skirt, and patted
the ends of her curls.

THE EVALUATION OF LITERATURE

From what has been said, our first and most obvious con-
clusion is that since literature is principally the expression of
feeling, affective elements are of the utmost importance in all
literary writing. In the evaluation of a novel, poem, play, or
short story, as well as in the evaluation of sermons, moral
exhortations, political speeches, and directive utterances gen-
erally, the usefulness of the given piece of writing as a "map"
of actual "territories" is always secondary — sometimes quite
irrelevant. If this were not the case, Gulliver's Travels, Alice
in Wonderland, The Scarlet Letter, or Emerson's Essays
would have no excuse for existence.

Secondly, when we say that a given piece of affective
writing is true, we do not mean "scientifically true." It may
mean merely that we agree with the sentiment; it may also
mean that we beUeve that a feeling has been accurately ex-
pressed; again, it may mean that the feeHngs it evokes are
believed to be such as will lead us to better social or personal
conduct. There is no end to the meanings "true" may have.
People who feel that science and literature or science and re-
ligion are in necessary conflict have often in addition a two-
valued orientation, so that everything is to them either "true"
or "untrue." To such people, if science is "true," then Htera-
ture or religion is nonsense; if literature or religion is "true,"

AFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION I57

science is merely "pretentious ignorance." What should be
understood when people tell us that certain statements are
"scientifically true" is that they are useful and verifiable
formulations, suitable for the purposes of organized co-opera-
tive workmanship. What should be understood when people
tell us that the plays of Shakespeare or the Constitution of
the United States are "eternally true" is that they produce in
us attitudes toward our fellow men, an understanding of our-
selves, or feelings of deep moral obligation that are valuable
to humanity under any conceivable circumstances.

Thirdly, let us consider an important shortcoming of the
language of reports and of scientific writing. John Smith in
love with Mary is not William Brown in love with Jane;
William Brown in love with Jane is not Henry Jones in love
with Anne; Henry Jones in love with Anne is not Robert
Browning in love with Elizabeth Barrett. Each of these situa-
tions is unique; no two loves are exactly alike — in fact, no love
even between the same two people is exactly the same from
day to day. Science, seeking as always laws of the widest
possible applicability and the greatest possible generality,
would abstract from these situations only what they have in
common. But each of these lovers is conscious only of the
uniqueness of his own feelings; each feels, as we all know,
that he is the first one in the world ever to have so loved.

How is that sense of difference conveyed? It is here that
affective uses of language play their most important part. The
infinity of differences in our feelings towards all the many
experiences that we undergo are too subtle to be reported;
they must be expressed. And we express them by the compli-
cated manipulation of tones of voice, of rhythms, of connota-
tions, of affective facts, of metaphors, of allusions, of every
affective device of language at our command.

Frequently the feehngs to be expressed are so subtle or

158 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

complex that a few lines of prose or verse are not enough to
convey them. It is sometimes necessary, therefore, for authors
to write entire books, carrying their readers through numbers
of scenes, situations, and adventures, pushing their sympathies
now this way and now that, arousing in turn their fighting
spirit, their tenderness, their sense of tragedy, their laughter,
their superstitiousness, their cupidity, their sensuousness, their
piety. Only in such ways, sometimes, can the exact feelings an
author wants to express be re-created in his readers. This,
then, is the reason that novels, poems, dramas, stories, alle-
gories, and parables exist: to convey such propositions as
"Life is tragic" or "Susanna is beautiful," not by telling us
so, but by putting us through a whole series of experiences
that make us feel toward life or toward Susanna as the author
did. Literature is the most exact expression of feelings, while
science is the most exact f{ind of reporting. Poetry, which con-
denses all the affective resources of language into patterns of
infinite rhythmical subtlety, may be said to be the language
of expression at its highest degree of efficiency.

SCIENTIFIC VS. AFFECTIVE
COMMUNICATION

In a very real sense, then, people who have read good
literature have lived more than people who cannot or will
not read. To have read Gulliver's Travels is to have had the
experience, with Jonathan Swift, of turning sick at the stomach
at the conduct of the human race; to read Huckleberry Finn
is to feel what it is like to drift down the Mississippi River
on a raft; to have read Byron is to have suffered with him
his rebellions and neuroses and to have enjoyed with him his
nose-thumbing at society; to have read Native Son is to know
how it feels to be frustrated in the particular way in which
Negroes in Chicago are frustrated. This is the great task that

AFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION I59

affective communication performs: it enables us to feel how
others felt about life, even if they lived thousands of miles
away and centuries ago. It is not true that "we have only one
life to live"; if we can read, we can live as many more lives
and as many kinds of lives as we wish.

By means of scientific communication, then, with its inter-
national systems of weights and measures, international sys-
tems of botanical and zoological nomenclature, international
mathematical symbols, we are enabled to exchange informa-
tion with each other, pool our observations, and acquire col-
lective control over our environment. By means of affective
communication — by conversation and gesture when we can
see each other, but by literature and other arts when we can-
not— we come to understand each other, to cease being
brutishly suspicious of each other, and gradually to realize
the profound community that exists between us and our
fellow men. Science, in short, makes us able to co-operate;
the arts enlarge our sympathies so that we become willing to
co-operate.

We are today equipped technologically to be able to get
practically anything we want. But our wants are crude. There
seems to be only one ambition that is strong enough to impel
us to employ our technological capacities to the full, and that
ambition is the desire for tribal (national) aggrandizement —
the desire to bomb our neighbors faster and more murder-
ously than they can bomb us. The immediate task of the
future, then, is not only to expand technology into fields
where superstition now reigns — for example, economics and
politics — and makes such calamities inevitable; it is also to
bring, through the affective power of the arts and of literature,
civilizing influences to bear upon our savage wills. We must
not only be able to work together; we must actively want
to work together.

l6o LANGUAGE IN ACTION

APPLICATIONS

All literary criticism that tries to find out what exactly an
author is saying presupposes, of course, knowledge of princi-
ples such as those discussed in this chapter. Their real appli-
cation can only be in abundant and careful reading and in
the development of taste through consciousness of what is
going on in every piece of literature one reads, whether it be
a magazine serial, a Katherine Mansfield short story, or an
Elizabethan play.

The subject of metaphor, however, offers an interesting side
excursion. The following are additional examples of "dead
metaphors." If their origin is not clear to you, look them up.

caterpillar tractor incentive auspicious

clew poll tax fourflusher

echelon siren crown gear

scale (in music) High Sierras (mountains) poached egg
pommel (of a saddle)

The following expressions would look strange if one were
conscious of the dead metaphors they contain. Look these up
too, if you don't see why:

domestic economy

head of cabbage

afternoon matinee

They were good companions, but they never ate together.

He took the stars into consideration.

The southpaw was a dextrous pitcher and was exceedingly
adroit in placing his fast curve ball. Nevertheless in most ways
his manners were gauche, and there was something sinister about
his appearance.

The reader may also find it instructive to make a list of the
metaphorical expressions current in some one trade, profes-

AFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION l6l

sion, hobby, or sport with which he is familiar; for example,
railroading, baseball, banking and finance, side show barking,
aviation, jaz^ orchestra work, or the running of quick-lunch
counters. i

To get back, however, to the main business of this chapter,
literary criticism: a useful practice, even for an experienced
reader, is to itake short passages of prose and verse — espe-
cially passages he has long been familiar with — and to find
out by careful analysis not only what the author is saying,
how he feels about his subject, and how he feels towards the
reader, but also how the author conveys or reveals those
feelings. The following passages may serve as additional ma-
terial for this kind of analysis:

1. "It was a crisp and spicy morning in early October. The
lilacs and laburnums, lit with the glory fires of autumn, hung
burning and flashing in the upper air, a fairy bridge provided by
kind Nature for the wingless wild things that have their home in
the tree tops and would visit together; the larch and the pome-
granate flung their purple and yellow flames in brilliant broad
splashes along the slanting sweep of the woodland; the sensuous
fragrance of innumerable deciduous flowers rose upon the swoon-
ing atmosphere; far in the empty sky a solitary oesophagus slept
upon motionless wing; everywhere brooded stillness, serenity,
and the peace of God." — mark twain.

2. "They called a special meeting of the Board of Aldermen.
A deputation waited upon her, knocked at the door through
which no visitor had passed since she ceased giving china-painting
lessons eight or ten years earlier. They were admitted by the old
Negro into a dim hall from which a stairway mounted into still
more shadow. It smelled of dust and disuse — a close, dank smell.
The Negro led them into the parlor. It was furnished in heavy,
leather-covered furniture. When the Negro opened the blinds of
one window, they could see that the leather was cracked; and
when they sat down, a faint dust rose sluggishly about their

1 62 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

thighs, spinning with slow motes in the single sun-ray. On a
tarnished gilt easel before the fireplace stood a crayon portrait
of Miss Emily's father.

"They rose when she entered — a small, fat woman in black,
with a thin gold chain descending to her waist and vanishing
into her belt, leaning on an ebony cane with a tarnished gold
head. Her skeleton was small and spare; perhaps that was why
what would have been merely plumpness in another was obesity
in her. She looked bloated, like a body long submerged in mo-
tionless water, and of that pallid hue. Her eyes, lost in the fatty
ridges of her face, looked like two small pieces of coal pressed
into a lump of dough as they moved from one face to another
while the visitors stated their errand,

"She did not ask them to sit. She just stood in the door and
listened quietly until the spokesman came to a stumbling halt.
Then they could hear the invisible watch ticking at the end of
the gold chain." — william faulkner, "A Rose for Emily." ^

3. "In this posture they travelled many hours, till they came
into a wide and well-beaten road, which, as they turned to the
right, soon brought them to a very fair promising inn, where
they all alighted; but so fatigued was Sophia, that as she had
sat her horse during the last five or six miles with great difficulty,
so was she now incapable of dismounting from him without
assistance. This the landlord, who had hold of her horse, pres-
ently perceiving, offered to lift her in his arms from her saddle;
and she too readily accepted the tender of his service. Indeed
fortune seems to have resolved to put Sophia to the blush that
day, and the second malicious attempt succeeded better than the
first; for my landlord had no sooner received the young lady in
his arms, than his feet, which the gout had lately very severely
handled, gave way, and down he tumbled; but, at the same time,
with no less dexterity than gallantry, contrived to throw himself
under his charming burden, so that he alone received any bruise
from the fall; for the great injury which happened to Sophia
was a violent shock given to her modesty by an immoderate grin,

1 Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.

AFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION 1 63

which, at her rising from the ground, she observed in the counte-
nances of most of the bystanders. This made her suspect what
had really happened, and what we shall not here relate for the
indulgence of those readers who are capable of laughing at the
offence given to a young lady's delicacy. Accidents of this kind
we have never regarded in a comical light; nor will we scruple
to say that he must have a very inadequate idea of the modesty
of a beautiful young woman, who would wish to sacrifice it to
so paltry a satisfaction as can arise from laughter."

HENRY FIELDING, Tom JOTICS.

4. To one who has been long in city pent,

'Tis very sweet to look into the fair

And open face of heaven — to breathe a prayer
Full in the smile of the blue firmament.
Who is more happy, when, with heart's content,

Fatigued he sinks into some pleasant lair

Of wavy grass, and reads a debonair
And gentle tale of love and languishment.?
Returning home at evening, with an ear

Catching the notes of Philomel — an eye
Watching the sailing cloudlet's bright career,

He mourns that day so soon has glided by:
E'en like the passage of an angel's tear

That falls through the clear ether silently.

JOHN KEATS

INTENSIONAL
ORIENTATION

The man of understanding can no more sit qtiiet
and resigned while his country lets its literature
decay, and lets good writing meet with contempt,
than a good doctor could sit quiet and contented
while some ignorant child was infecting itself with
tuberculosis under the impression that it was
merely eating jam tarts.

EZRA POUND

FREEDOM OF COMMUNICATION

WE in the United States, who enjoy about as much free-
dom of press and freedom of speech as can be found
anywhere in the world, frequendy forget that information in
the form of books, news, and education was long considered
too valuable a commodity to be distributed freely among the
common people. This is still the case, of course, in many
countries. All tyrannies, ancient and modern, go on the as-
sumption on the part of the rulers that they know best what
is good for the people, who should only have what informa-
tion they think is advisable. Until comparatively recent times,
education was withheld from all but the privileged classes.
In some states of the union, for example, it used to be a crimi-
nal offense to teach Negroes to read and write. The idea of
universal education was formerly regarded with as much
horror by the "best people" as sociahsm is today. Newspapers,
during the early days of journalism, had to be boodegged,
because governments were unwilling to permit them to exist.

164

INTENSIONAL ORIENTATION 165

Books formerly could be published only after official permis-
sion had been obtained. It is no accident that freedom of
speech and freedom of press go hand in hand with democracy
and that censorship and suppression always accompany
tyranny and dictatorship.

But the general suppression of information has rarely been
completely successful, and since the invention of printing, tele-
graph, radio, and other means of communication, it has be-
come even more difficult. Human beings, for the purposes of
their own survival, insist upon getting knowledge from as
many people as possible and also insist upon disseminating as
widely as possible whatever knowledge they themselves may
have found valuable. Authority and aristocratic privilege gain
temporary victories, but for the past three or four hundred
years at least, universal access to information has been, in
spite of periodic war censorship, steadily increasing. In such
a nation as the United States, where this tendency has had
its dullest development, the principles of universal education
and freedom of the press are rarely openly questioned. We
can dehver speeches without showing our manuscripts in ad-
vance to the chief of police. Power presses, cheaper methods
of printing, public circulating libraries, elaborate systems of
indexing and reference which make possible the quick find-
ing of practically any information anyone might want — these
and many other devices are now in operation in order that
we need not depend solely on our own experience, but may
utilize the experience of the rest of humanity. — .

Nevertheless, the struggle for universal freedom of com-
munication and the widest possible pooling of knowledge,
even within the confines of the United States, is far from
over. Standing in the way, first, are external difficulties. There
are still millions of illiterates; good books are not everywhere
available; there are many sections in our country without ade-
quate schools; some communities have no libraries; our news-

1 66 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

papers, although free of governmental interference, are too
often in the control of those who tell us only what they want
us to know.

WORDS AS A BARRIER

We are concerned here, however, with the conditions within
ourselves that stand in the way of universal communication.
The idealistic proponents of universal education believed that
people able to read and write would automatically be wiser
and more capable of intelligent self-government than illiter-
ates. But we are beginning to learn that mere literacy is not
enough. People who think like savages can continue to do so
even after learning to read. As the result of the necessary
abstractness of our vocabulary, general literacy has often had
the effect of merely making our savagery more complicated
and difficult to deal with than it was under conditions of
illiteracy. And, as we have also seen, rapidity and ease of
communication often make savagery infectious. Universal
hteracy has brought new problems of its own.

Because words are such a powerful instrument, we have in
many ways a superstitious awe rather than an understanding
of them — and even if we have no awe, we tend at least to have
an undue respect for them. For example, when someone in
the audience at a meeting asks the speaker a question, and
when the speaker makes a long and plausible series of noises
without answering it, sometimes both the questioner and the
speaker fail to notice that the question has not been answered;
they both sit down apparently perfectly satisfied. That is to
say, the mere fact that an appropriate-sounding set of noises
has been made satisfies some people that a statement has been
made; thereupon they accept and sometimes memorize that
set of noises, serenely confident that it answers a question
or solves a problem.

INTENSIONAL ORIENTATION 1 67

Again, there are such incidents as the following. At a time
when the action of a governor of Wisconsin in deaUng with
an official in the state university was being much discussed
in the newspapers, the writer had occasion to travel through
the state. Everywhere strangers and casual acquaintances who
knew that the writer was connected with the university
asked, "Say, what's the inside dope on that aflair at the uni-
versity? It's all politics, isn't it?" The writer never found out
what anybody meant by "It's all poUtics," but in order to save
trouble, he usually answered, "Yes, I suppose it is." There-
upon the questioner would look quite pleased with his own
sagacity and say, "That's what I thought! Thanks for telling
me." In short, the assurance that "politics" was the appropriate
noise to make satisfied the questioner completely, in spite of
the fact that the question which led to all the public discus-
sion, namely, whether the governor had abused his political
office or had carried out his political duty, had been left both
unasked and unanswered. This undue regard for words
maizes us tend to permit words to act as barriers between us
and reality, instead of as guides to reality.

INTENSIONAL ORIENTATION

In previous chapters, we have analyzed particular kinds of
misevaluation. All of these can now be summed up under
one term: intensional orientation — the habit of guiding our-
selves by words alone, rather than by the facts to which words
should guide us. We all tend to assume, when professors,
writers, politicians, or other apparently responsible individuals
open their mouths, that they are saying something meaning-
ful, simply because words have informative and affective con-
notations that arouse our feelings. When we open our own
mouths, we are even more likely to make that assumption.
The result of such indiscriminate lumping together of sense

l68 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

and nonsense is that "maps" pile up independently of "terri-
tory." And, in the course of a lifetime, we may pile up entire
systems of meaningless noises, placidly unaware that they bear
no relationship to reality whatever.

Intensional orientation may be regarded as the general
cause leading to the multitude of errors already pointed out:
the unawareness of contexts; the tendency towards signal re-
actions; the confusion of levels of abstraction — of what is in-
side one's head with what is outside; the consciousness of
similarities, but not of differences; the habit of being content
to explain words by means of definitions, that is, more words.
By intensional orientation, "capitalists," "Bolsheviks," "farm-
ers," and "workingmen" "are" what we say they are; America
"is" a democracy, because everybody says so; relief "destroys
character" because it "logically follows" that if people are
"given something for nothing," it's "bound to destroy their
character."

OVERVERBALIZATION

Let us take a term, such as "churchgoer," which denotes
Smithi, Smitha, Smiths . . . , who attend divine services
with moderate regularity. Note that the denotation says
nothing about the "churchgoer's" character: his kindness to
children or lack of it, the happiness or unhappiness of his
married life, the honesty or dishonesty of his business prac-
tices. The term is applicable to a large number of people,
some good, some bad, some poor, some rich, and so on. The
intensional meanings or connotations of the term, however,
are quite a different matter. "Churchgoer" suggests "good
Christian"; "good Christian" suggests fidelity to wife and
home, kindness to children, honesty in business, sobriety of
living habits, and a whole range of admirable qualities. These

INTENSIONAL ORIENTATION 1 69

suggestions further suggest, by two-valued orientation, that
non-churchgoers are Hlcely not to have these quaUties.

If our intensional orientations are serious, therefore, we can
manufacture verbally a whole system of values — a whole sys-
tem for the classification of mankind into sheep and goats —
out of the connotations, informative and afFective, of the
term "churchgoer." That is to say, once the term is given, we
can, by proceeding from connotation to connotation, keep
going indefinitely. A map is independent of territory, so that
we can keep on adding mountains and rivers after we have
drawn in all the mountains and rivers that actually exist in
the territory. Once we get started, we can spin out whole
essays, sermons, books, and even philosophical systems on the
basis of the word "churchgoer" without paying a particle of
further attention to Smithi, Smithz, Smiths . . .

Likewise, give a good Fourth of July orator the word
"Americanism" to play with, and he can worry it for hours,
exalting "Americanism," making dreadful thundering noises
at "foreign -isms," and evoking great applause from his
hearers. There is no way of stopping this process by which
free associations, one word "implying" another, can be made
to go on and on. That is why, of course, there are so many
people in the world whom one calls "windbags." That is why
many orators, newspaper columnists, commencement day
speakers, politicians, and high school elocutionists can speak
at a moment's notice on any subject whatever. Indeed, a great
many of the "English" and "speech" courses in our schools
are merely training in this very thing — how to keep on talking
importantly even when one hasn't a thing to say — or, to put
it another way, how to conceal one's intellectual bankruptcy,
not only from others, but also from oneself.

This kind of "thinking," which is the product of intensional
orientation, is called circular, because, since all the possible

170 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

conclusions are contained in the connotations of the word to
start with, we are bound, no matter how hard or how long
we "think," to come back to our starting point. Indeed, we
can hardly be said ever to leave our starting point. How much
energy is wasted per annum in the United States alone on this
"circular thinking" is impossible to compute, but it must be
enough to keep all the merry-go-rounds in the world going
for a century. Of course, as soon as we are face to face with
a fact, we are compelled to shut up or start over again some-
where else. That is why it is so "rude" in certain kinds of
meetings and conversations to bring up anv facts. They spoil
everybody's good time.

Now let us go back to our "churchgoer." A certain Mr.
William McDinsmore — the name is fictitious, of course — has
had the term applied to him because of his habit of going to
church. On examination, Mr. McDinsmore turns out to be,
let us say, indifferent to his social obligations, unkind to his
children, unfaithful to his wife, and dishonest in his trustee-
ship of other people's funds. If we have been habitually ori-
entated towards Mr. McDinsmore by the intensional mean-
ings of the word "churchgoer," this proves to be a shocking
case. "How can a man be a churchgoer and so dishonest at
the same time?" The problem is completely incapable of solu-
tion for some people. Unable to separate the intensional from
the extensional "churchgoer," they are forced to one of three
conclusions, all absurd:

I. "This is an exceptional case" — meaning, "I'm not changing
my mind about churchgoers, who are always nice people no mat-
ter how many exceptions you can find."

1. "He isn't really that bad! He can't be!" — that is, denying the
fact in order to escape the necessity of accounting for it.

3. "All my ideals are shattered! A man cant believe anything

INTENSIONAL ORIENTATION I/I

any more! My belief in human nature is destroyed!" — that is,
complete disillusionment, leading to cynicism.^

An unfounded complacency, which can so easily be fol-
lowed by "disillusionment," is perhaps the most serious con-
sequence of intensional orientation. And, as we have seen,
we all have intensional orientation regarding some subjects.
Some of us go daily past gangs of WPA workers sweating
over the construction of roads and bridges and still declare
quite honestly, "I never saw a WPA worker doing anything
useful in all my life!" By the definition some of us have,
WPA is "made work"; "made work" is not "real work";
therefore, even if WPA workers have built schools, parks, and
municipal auditoriums, they weren't really working. Further-
more, many of us encounter daily hundreds of cars driven by
women who handle them expertly; yet we declare, again quite
honestly, "I never saw a woman yet who could really drive
a car." By definition, women are "timid," "nervous," and
"easily frightened"; therefore, they "can't drive." If we know
women who have driven successfully for years, we maintain
that "they've just been lucky."

The important fact to be noticed about such attitudes to-
wards "churchgoers," "WPA workers," and "woman drivers"
is that we should never have made such mistakes nor so
blinded ourselves if we had never heard anything about them
beforehand. Such attitudes are not the product of ignorance;
genuine ignorance doesn't have attitudes. They are the result
of false knowledge — false knowledge that robs us of whatever

1 Those who remember the storm of discussion that attended the publica-
tion of Sinclair Lewis's Elmer Gantry (1927) will recall how the dis-
putants divided into two main factions. First, there were those who main-
tained that such a minister as Elmer Gantry — by intensional definition of
"minister" — "couldn't possibly have existed," and that therefore Lewis had
libeled the profession; secondly, there were the cynics who hailed the book
as "an expose of religion." Neither conclusion was, of course, justified by
the noveh

172 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

good sense we were born with. As we have already seen, part
of this false knowledge we make up for ourselves with our
primitive habits of mind. However, a great deal of it is manu-
jactured through our careless habits of talking too much.

Many people, indeed, are in a perpetual vicious circle. Be-
cause of intensional orientation, they are oververbalized; by
oververbalization, they strengthen their intensional orienta-
tion. Such people burst into speech as automatically as juke
boxes; a nickel in the slot, and they're off. With habits of this
kind, it is possible for us to tal\ ourselves into un-sane atti-
tudes, not only towards "woman drivers," "Jews," "capital-
ists," "bankers," and "labor unions," but also towards our per-
sonal problems: "mother," "relatives," "money," "popularity,"
"success," "failure" — and, most of all, towards "love" and
"sex."

OUTSIDE SOURCES OF INTENSIONAL
ORIENTATION: (l) EDUCATION

In addition to our own habits, there are verbal influences
from without that tend to increase our intensional orienta-
tions. Of these, only three will be dealt with here: edLucation,
magazine fiction, and advertising.

Education really has two tasks. First, it is supposed to tell
us facts about the world we live in: language is used informa-
tively. Perhaps an even more important task, however, is that
of inculcating ideals and "molding character"; that is, lan-
guage is used directively, in order that students should con-
form to the usages and traditions of the society in which they
live. In their directive function, therefore, schools tell us the
"principles" of democracy — how democracy ought to work.
But often they fail to perform their informative function.
That is, they may fail to tell us how democracy does work:
how the patronage system operates; what precinct captains

INTENSIONAL ORIENTATION I73

and ward heelers do; how mayors, governors, and presidents
are sometimes controlled by powers behind the throne; how
legislative logrolling — "You vote for my bill and I'll vote for
yours" — determines the fate of many bills/

Again, schools tell how "good English" ought to be spoken
and not how it is spoken. For example, we are all told that
a double negative makes a positive, although nowhere is there
any record of an officer of law holding a man on a charge of
murder on the grounds that since the prisoner had said, "I
ain't killed nobody," his words were actually a confession that
he had killed somebody. Also, English teachers say that "there
is no such word" as "ain't." They ignore the fact that the
language of hillbillies, rustics, gangsters, and mugs is often
more expressive, especially for purposes of affective communi-
cation, than what they call "good English."

Perhaps the greater part of education in some subjects is
directive rather than informative. Law schools say much more
about how law ought to work than about how it does work;
the effects of the stomach ulcers, domestic troubles, and
private economic views of judges upon their decisions are
not regarded as fit topics for discussion in most law schools.
History teachers of every nation often suppress or gloss over
the disgraceful episodes in the histories of their nations. The
reason for these silences and suppressions is that, although
such statements may be informatively true, it is feared that
they may, as directives, have bad effects on "impressionable
minds."

Unfortunately, neither students nor teachers are in the habit
of distinguishing between informative and directive utter-
ances. Teachers issue such statements as "The United States is
the greatest country in the world" and "Water is composed

1 There is today, however, a vigorous movement, especially on the part
of social science teachers, to make secondary school education in such sub-
jects as civics and government more informative than has been customary
in the past.

174 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

of oxygen and hydrogen" and ask their students to regard
them as "true," without telling them to distinguish between
the two senses of the word "true." Students thereupon find
that some things their teachers say check with experience,
while others are either questionable or false when examined
as if they were informative statements. This creates among
students, especially at around high school age, an uneasiness —
a sense that their teachers are "stringing them along" — that
leads many of them to leave school prematurely. Getting out
of school, they feel that their suspicions about their teachers
were correct, because, having mistaken the directive utterances
they learned for informative, scientific utterances, they natu-
rally find that they were "badly misinformed." Such experi-
ences are probably the basis for that contempt for the "aca-
demic mind" which is so common in some circles. The fault
is both the teacher's and the student's.

But those who continue in school are often no better off.
Having indiscriminately lumped together directive and in-
formative statements, they suffer shock and disillusionment
when they get to a college where education is more realistic
than that to which they have been accustomed. Other people
continue all the way through college to confuse the directive
and the informative; they may be aided in doing so by the un-
realistic educational programs offered by the college. In such
cases, the longer they go to school, the more badly adjusted
they become to actualities. We have seen that directive lan-
guage consists essentially of "maps" of "territories-to-be." We
cannot attempt to cross a river on a bridge that is yet-to-be
without falling into the water. Similarly stlidents cannot be
expected to guide their conduct exclusively by such statements
as "Good always triumphs over evil" and "Our system of
government ensures equality of opportunity to all men" with-
out getting some terrible shocks. This may account in part
for the fact that "bitterness," "disillusionment," and "cyni-

INTENSIONAL ORIENTATION I75

cism" are particularly common among people during the first
ten years after their graduation from college. Some people,
indeed, never get over their shocks.

Education has to be, of course, both informative and di-
rective. We cannot simply give information to students with-
out giving them some "aspirations," "ideals," and "aims" so
that they will know what to do with their information when
they get it. But it is just as important to remember that we
must not give them ideals alone without some factual infor-
mation upon which to act; without such information they
cannot even begin to bring their ideals to fruition. Informa-
tion alone, students rightly insist, is "dry as dust." Directives
alone, impressed upon the memory by frequent repetition,
produce only intensional orientations that unfit students for
the realities of life and render them liable to shock and cyni-
cism in later years.

outside sources of intensional
orientation: (2) magazine

FICTION

The next time the reader gets a printed slip giving "in-
structions for installation" with a car radio, a fog light, or
similar piece of apparatus, he should notice how much close
attention the reading of such a slip requires — how much con-
stant checking with extensional facts: "The wires are distin-
guished from each other by colored threads in the insulation."
We check and see if this is so. "Connect the positive wire,
indicated by a red thread" — we find the wire — "with the ter-
minal marked with the letter A . . ."

He should then contrast such a task of reading with that of
reading a magazine story in one of the "pulp" or "slick"
magazines. This latter task can be performed with hardly any
attention whatever; we can keep the radio going full blast,

1/6 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

we can be munching chocolates, we can be teasing the cat
with our feet, we can even carry on desuhory conversations
without being unduly distracted from the story. The reading
of the average magazine story, that is, requires no extensional
checking whatsoever, neither by looking at the extensional
world around us nor by furrowing our foreheads in attempts
to recall apposite facts. The story follows nice, easy paths of
already established intensional orientations. As we have al-
ready seen, the expected judgments are accompanied by the
expected facts. The straying hubby returns to his mate, and
the little wife who is "true blue" triumphs over the beautiful
but unscrupulous glamour girl; the little son is a "tousled,
mischievous, but thoroughly irresistible little darling"; the big
industrialist is "stern, but has a kindly twinkle in his eye."
Such stories are sometimes cleverly contrived, but they never,
if they can help it, disturb anyone's intensional orientations.
Although in real life communists are sometimes charming
people, they are never presented as such, because in the Ught
of intensional orientations, anyone called "communist" can-
not at the same time be "charming." Although in real life
Negroes often occupy positions of dignity and professional
responsibility, in magazine stories they are never permitted
to appear except as comic characters or as servants, because,
by intensional orientation, Negroes should never be anything
else.

There are two important reasons for the maintenance of
intensional orientation in mass-production fiction, political
articles, books, and radio dramas. The first is that it is easy
on the reader. The reader is, after all, seeking relaxation.
The housewife has just got the kids to bed; the businessman
has had "a hard day at the office." They do not want to try to
account for unfamiHar or disturbing facts. They want to day-
dream.

The other reason is, of course, that such writing is easy

INTENSIONAL ORIENTATION I77

on the writer. In order to keep the market supphed, he has to
produce so many thousands of words a week. Proceeding by
intension, as we have seen, the orator can go on talking for
hours. Likewise proceeding by intension, the "pulp" or "slick"
story writer can, unencumbered by new facts to be explained
or differences to be noted, keep on writing page after page.
The resulting product is, to be sure, like paper towels, fit
only to be used once and thrown away. Nobody ever reads
a magazine story twice.

But, the reader may ask, since very few people take such
stuff seriously anyway, why bother about it? The reason is
that although we may not "take it seriously," our intensional
orientations, which result from the word-deluge we live in,
are deepened by such reading matter, although we may be
quite unaware of the fact at the time. We must not forget that
our excessive intensional orientations blind us to the realities
around us.

outside sources of intensional
orientation: (3) advertising

Perhaps the worst offender of all in the creation of inten-
sional orientations is advertising as it is now practiced. The
fundamental purpose of advertising, the announcing of prod-
ucts, prices, new inventions, and special sales, is not to be
quarreled with; such announcements deliver needed informa-
tion, which we are glad to get. But advertising long ago
ceased to restrict itself to the giving of needed information,
and its principal purpose, especially in so-called "national
advertising," has become the creating, in as many of us as
possible, of signal reactions. That is to say, there is nothing
that would profit the national advertiser more than to have us
automatically ask for Coca-Cola whenever we walked to a
soda fountain, automatically take Alka-Seltzer whenever we

IjS LANGUAGE IN ACTION

felt ill, automatically ask for Chesterfields whenever we
wanted to smoke. Such automatic reactions are produced, of
course, by investing "brand names" with all sorts of desirable
affective connotations, suggestive of health, wealth, social
prominence, domestic bliss, romance, personal popularity,
fashion, and elegance. The process is one of creating in us
intensional orientations toward brand names:

If you want love interest to thrive, then try this dainty way. . . .
For this way is glamorous! It's feminine! It's alluring! . . . In-
stinctively, you prefer this costly perfume of Kashmir Soap . . .
It's a fragrance men love. Massage each tiny ripple of your body
daily with this delicate, cleansing lather . . . Thrill as your
senses are kissed by Kashmir's exquisite perfume. Be radiant.

Advertisers further promote intensional habits of mind by
playing on words: the "extras" of skill and strength that
enable champions to win games are equated with the "extras"
of quahty that certain products are claimed to have; the "pro-
tective blending" that harmonizes wild animals with their en-
vironment and makes them invisible to their enemies is
equated with the "protective blending" of whiskies; a busi-
ness association has for some time been publicizing this
masterpiece of obfuscation: "If you work for a living you're
in Business; what helps Business helps you!" Even the few
facts that advertising gives us are charged with affective con-
notations: "It's got vitamins! It's chock-full of body-building,
bone-building, energy-building vitamins!!" Meaningless facts
are also charged with significance: "See the New Hy-Speed
Electric Iron. It's streamlined!"

Advertising has become, in short, the art of overcoming
us with words. When the consumer demands that, as a step
towards enabling him to orientate himself by facts rather than
by the affective connotations of brand names, all products
be required by law to have informative labels and verifiable

INTENSIONAL ORIENTATION 179

government grading, the entire advertising industry, backed
by newspapers and magazines, raises a hue and cry about
"government interference with business." The advertiser pre-
fers, that is, that we be governed by signal reactions in favor
of brand names rather than by consideration of the facts
about products. This, of course, works considerable injustice
on those advertisers — there are many — who have actual facts
to talk about; they are likely to meet with a skepticism that
they have done nothing to deserve.

When this advertising by verbal "glamorizing" succeeds in
producing these intensional orientations, the act of washing
with Kashmir Soap becomes, in our minds, a thrilling experi-
ence; brushing our teeth with Briten-Whyte Tooth Paste be-
comes, in our minds, a dramatic and timely warding off of
terrible personal calamities, such as getting fired or losing
one's girl friend; the smoking of cigarettes becomes, in our
minds, the sharing of the luxuries of New York's Four Hun-
dred; the taking of dangerous laxatives becomes, in our
minds, "following the advice of a world-renowned Viennese
specialist." ^ That is to say, we are sold daydreams with every
bottle of mouth-wash, and delusions of grandeur with every
package of breakfast-food.

The reader may say, again: If people want to pay for day-
dreams in their bath salts and want to battle imaginary dis-
eases with imaginary cures, isn't that their business? It isn't
entirely. The willingness to rely on words instead of examini
ing facts is a disorder in the communicative process. Any^'
thing so important as the degeneration of human intercom^

1 "But," some people are in the habit of saying, "surely nationally adver-
tised products must be good! It stands to reason that a big advertiser couldn't
afford to risk his reputation by selling inferior products!" A more perfect
illustration of intensional orientation could hardly be found. Such people
fail to realize, of course, that this is precisely the attitude that advertisers
bank on. Yet these same people would hesitate to say, "Our public officials
must be honest! It stands to reason that men in their position couldn't
afford to risk their reputations by betraying the public interest."

l8o LANGUAGE IN ACTION

munication is the concern of all of us. Intensional orientations
— and they are increasing on every hand throughout the world
as the result of the spread of literacy and the wide use of the
radio — are, one might almost say, a kind of disease of the
human evaluational process. It is our concern if our neigh-
bors have smallpox. It is also our concern if our fellow men
are un-sane in their reactions to words; this disease too is, as
we have seen, infectious. The uncritical response to the in-
cantations of advertising is a serious symptom of widespread
evaluational disorder.

14.

RATS AND MEN

We have tinprecedented conditions to deal with
and novel adjustments to make — there can be no
doubt of that. We also have a great stock of
scientific knowledge unknown to our grandfathers
with which to operate. So novel are the conditions,
so copious the knowledge, that we must under-
take the arduous task of reconsidering a great part
of the opinions about man and his relations to his
fellow-men which have been handed down to us
by previous generations who lived in far other con-
ditions and possessed far less information about the
world and themselves. We have, however, first to
create an unprecedented attitude of mind to cope
with unprecedented conditions, and to utilize un-
precedented knowledge.

JAMES HARVEY ROBINSON

SOME readers may have seen the article and pictures in the
magazine Life of March 6, 1939, reporting an experiment
with a rat, performed by Dr. N. R. F. Maier of the University
of Michigan. The rat is first trained to jump off the edge of
a platform at one of two doors. If it jumps to the right, the
door holds fast, and the rat falls to the floor; if it jumps to
the left, the door opens, and the rat finds a dish of food.
When the rat is well trained to these reactions, the situation
is reversed; the food is put behind the right door, and the left
door is made fast. The rat, however, continues to jump at the
left door, each time bumping its nose and falling to the floor.
Finally, it refuses to jump at all and has to be pushed. When
pushed, it again jumps to the left. Thereupon the right door

181

l82 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

is opened so that the food is visible, and again the rat is forced
to jump. The rat, says the report, "persistently jumps at the
same door as before, bumps its nose, grows more and more
nervous as it finds it is up against an insoluble problem. In
desperation, it leaps off the platform and races around the
floor, bounces about like a kangaroo. When it stops, ex-
hausted, it goes into trembling convulsions, then falls into a
coma." In this passive state, it refuses to eat, refuses to take
any interest in anything: it can be rolled up into a ball or
suspended in the air by its legs — the rat has ceased to care
what happens to it. It has had a "nervous breakdown." ^

It is the "insolubility" of the rat's problem that leads to its
nervous breakdown, and, as Dr. Maier cautiously intimates, it
is the "insolubility" of human problems that leads many hu-
man beings to have nervous breakdowns. Rats and men seem
to go through pretty much the same stages. First, they are
trained to make habitually a given choice when confronted
by a given problem; secondly, they get a terrible shock when
they find that the conditions have changed and that the choice
doesn't produce the expected results; third, they continue
making that choice anyway; fourth, they sullenly refuse to
act at all; fifth, when by external compulsion they are forced
to make a choice, they again make the one they were origi-
nally trained to make — and again get a bump on the nose;
finally, even with the goal visible in front of them, to be
attained simply by making a different choice, they go crazy
out of frustration. They tear around wildly; they sulk in
corners and refuse to eat; they cease to care what happens to
them; bitter, cynical, disillusioned, they may even commit
suicide.

^ This account of Dr. Maier's experiment is, I am told, inaccurate. But since
the inaccuracies are matters of detail which do not alter the principles in-
volved, I have permitted it to stand as originally written on the basis of the
article in Life.

RATS AND MEN 183

Is this an exaggerated picture? It hardly seems so. The
pattern recurs throughout human Hfe, from the small trage-
dies of the home to the world-shaking tragedies among
nations. In order to cure her husband's faults, a wife may
nag him. His faults get worse, so she nags him some more.
Naturally his faults get worse still — and she nags him even
more. Governed, like the rat, by signal reactions to the prob-
lem of her husband's faults, she can meet it only in one way.
The longer she continues, the worse it gets, until they are
both nervous wrecks; their marriage is destroyed, and their
lives are shattered.

Again, an industrialist may want to prevent strikes in his
plant and may believe that the only way to do this is to
prevent the formation of unions. He therefore fires union
men. This may provoke his men into wanting to form a union
strong enough to fight arbitrary dismissals, so that there is
an increase of union activity. The increase in union activity
makes the employer increase his anti-union activities; he hires
labor spies and pays "loyal employees" to beat up union men
and run them out of town. The more the union men are
beaten up, the more determined they become; they want to
"get back at him." The more aware the employer becomes
of the hostihty of his workers, the more angry and violent
become his tactics. He stocks up on tear gas and munitions
and organizes an army of company police. In the end, his
plant is completely tied up in the bitter and bloody strike he
was trying to avoid. When the National Labor Relations
Board orders him to recognize the union, he nearly has an
apoplectic fit. His physician recommends "complete quiet and
rest"; reason, "nervous breakdown."

Again, a nation may believe that the only way to secure
peace and dignity is through strong armaments. This makes
neighboring nations anxious, so that they increase their
armaments too. There is a war. The lesson of the war, the

184 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

first nation declares when it is all over, is that we were not
strongly enough armed to preserve peace; we must double
our armaments. This naturally makes the neighboring nations
twice as anxious, so that they double their armaments too.
There is another war, bigger and bloodier. When this is over,
the first nation declares: "We have learned our lesson. Never
again shall we make the mistake of underestimating our de-
fense needs. This time we must be sure to be sufficiently
armed to preserve peace. This time we must triple our arma-
ments. . . ."

Of course these instances are purposely oversimplified, but
are not vicious circles of this kind responsible for the fact
that we often are unable to get at or do anything about the
conditions that lead to such tragedies? The pattern is fre-
quently recognizable; the goal may be in sight, attainable
only by a change in methods. Nevertheless, governed by signal
reactions, the rat "cannot" get food, the wife "cannot" cure
her husband's faults, strikes "cannot" be prevented, and wars
"cannot" be stopped.

''insoluble" problems

How about our other apparently insoluble problems? Why
do people maintain, in spite of all the fruit that is permitted
to rot, all the grain that has to be stored away, all the coffee
that has to be burned and dumped into the ocean in order
to "stabilize prices," that we "cannot afford" to feed the un-
employed and the undernourished? Why does every nation
want to manufacture and sell to the people within its borders
at higher prices the things it could import more cheaply from
elsewhere? Why, if it continues to send away more of its
natural resources, more of the products of its soil's fertility,
more of the products of its labor than it receives in exchange
from other nations, does it consider that it has a "favorable"

RATS AND MEN 185

balance of trade? Why do people speak bitterly about the
illiteracy and ignorance of Negroes and then use their illiter-
acy and ignorance as grounds for opposing any measures for
ameliorating their condition ? The world is full of such absurd
paradoxes, the most tragic feature of which is not simply that
they exist and have existed for a long time, but that they are
steadily becoming worse even as we struggle over their solu-
tion.

These are problems which "conservatives" and "liberals"
agree are serious and fundamental. Almost all of us recognize
that dislocations like these are likely to wreck us. Yet we are
incapable of doing anything to save ourselves. Why? Is there
not enough intelligence and understanding in the minds of
human beings to find a way out ? Are we incapable of finding
grounds for agreement sufficient to act upon?

The fault does not lie in any lack of "brains." Nor does it
lie in our inability to control our physical environment, for
human beings have amply demonstrated that they can per-
form near miracles in science, medicine, and the construction
of machinery. The point at which we fail is in organizing
human co-operation — in using the machinery of human com-
munication.

These problems which were touched upon above are ad-
mittedly complex. It is not a question of their being "all in
the mind," and it is not denied that one reason they are so
difficult is that many conflicting interests are involved. They
are not, however, insoluble. Perhaps the most dramatic thing
about human behavior is how many "insoluble" problems are
promptly solved when the necessity is pressing enough. It
would have been "impossible" to send the slum children of
London to the country for the sake of their health. But when
the war began, the evacuation took place over a week end.
It was demonstrated time and again that it was "impossible"
for German economy to continue without a gold supply.

lB6 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

That was seven or eight years ago. 0£ course the things done
in wartime are not always good things. But they do show
the almost unlimited capacity of human beings for performing
the "impossible" when driven to it. What is tragic is that they
have to be driven. The things that should be done to prevent
disasters are thought of as "impossible" for too long.

That is another of the "insoluble" problems of our democ-
racy, the inability to act before it is too late. This is a reference
not only to war preparations. We had to wait until a third of
of our irreplaceable topsoil had been eroded away before tak-
ing proper conservation measures; we waited until the Indian
population was almost wiped out by disease and their ancient
culture had almost been destroyed by miseducation and eco-
nomic stress before beginning to mend our ways in the treat-
ment of Indians and trying to revive their almost vanished
arts. What prevents us from acting? First of all, of course,
there is the inertia which makes us prefer the evils that we
have over others that we know not of. But our national re-
sistance to any and all changes involves more than that; it
has elements of pathology in it.

WHY WE ARE STALLED

It is natural, though often shortsighted, for people whose
•pocketbooks or personal comfort will be immediately affected
to oppose specific suggestions. A farmer whose land will be
flooded by a proposed dam quite naturally would rather have
the dam flood someone else's land. Nevertheless, if the dam
is for the benefit of hundreds of thousands of people whose
interests outweigh those of the farmer, he is compensated for
the land and required to move. Here the question is quite
simple and capable of extensional examination. "What," we
ask, "will be the results? How many members of society will
be benefited, and in what ways? How many will be harmed,

RATS AND MEN 187

and in what ways?" The decision follows the results of the
examination.

There are cases, however, in which no such examination of
extensional facts takes place, at least on the part of the gen-
eral public. In at least one instance, the enforced removal of
farm families was made the basis for opposition to a dam, and
all sorts of appeals were made to the public to resist "govern-
ment oppression" and to defend "justice" and "human rights."
The instigators of the appeals were not the farmers who were
being removed, but other people who had other reasons for
opposing the dam. Doubtless, however, because they thought
their own case was not very strong, they conducted the fight
at a higher level of abstraction — on the basis of the "oppres-
sion" of the "underdog."

Now "rights" and "justice" being very fine things and
"oppression" being a very bad thing, an intensionally orien-
tated pubhc responded like automatons to this appeal to their
two-valued orientation. The fact was overlooked that when-
ever a highway, a railroad, or an army camp is to be located
in a particular place, many people suffer from the enforced
condemnation of land. If the power to condemn did not exist,
many things society needs could never be built. Nevertheless,
a great deal of hysterical sympathy was aroused for the farm-
ers, so that even those who benefited from the dam when it
was finally built were in many cases unhappy about the bene-
fits; they felt that a "wrong principle" had triumphed, and
their intensional definition of "government" as an "oppressive
power" was deepened and perpetuated. All this could have
been debated sanely with reference to the extensional facts if
it had not been for the profound intensional orientations
which existed in people's rninds, ready to be exploited by
those who wished to exploit them.

In any one case of proposed change, what portion of society
will be benefited and what portion will be adversely affected

l88 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

can be demonstrated within a reasonable margin of error.
The issues debated, however, are never put in the form:
"Will the (extensional) results outweigh the (extensional)
hardships involved?" Instead the proposal is denounced as
"visionary," "reactionary," "leading towards state socialism,"
or "paving the way for dictatorship." There are few facts
which the defenders of the scheme can bring forward that
will stand up against powerful words such as these with an
intensionally orientated public.

The affective connotations of a word are more powerful
than the informative. "Planning" has become such a loaded
word that to accuse a politician of advocating "planning"
may ruin his political career. This in spite of the fact that
"planning" under other names is essential not only to any
well-run business, but to the conduct of the life of an indi-
vidual. This, also, when these same people who denounce
"planning" suffer from many of the economic hardships
which come as a result of not "planning." The word, however,
suggests to the intensionally orientated "the Five Year Plan"
and, going up the abstraction ladder, "communism," "op-
pression," "regimentation," and "godlessness." If we were all
extensionally orientated, however, our worry would not be
whether or not the suggestion can be classified as "planning,"
but what is planned and what good or harm it is going to do.

These mental blockages which so many of us have prevent
us from meeting our "insoluble" problems with the only
approach which can ever help us solve them: the extensional
approach — for we cannot distribute goods or carry on trade
by intensional definitions or high level abstractions. That
which is done in the extensional world must be done by ex-
tensional means, no matter who does them. If we as citizens
of a democracy are going to carry our share in the important
decisions about the things that concern us so greatly, we must
prepare ourselves to do so by coming down out of the clouds

RATS AND MEN 189

of abstractions and learning to consider the extensional prob-
lems of our society as we now consider the extensional prob-
lems of feeding ourselves and getting clothes and shelter. If,
however, we continue to cling to our intensional orientations,
with the signal reactions they produce, we shall have to con-
tinue behaving Hke Dr. Maier's rat. We shall be victims of
whoever wishes to call forth our signal reactions for whatever
purposes. We shall remain pathologically incapable of chang-
ing our ways of behavior, and there will be nothing for us to
do but, like the rat, to try the same wrong solutions over and
over again. After prolonged repetition of such futile conduct,
would it be remarkable if we found ourselves finally in a
condition of political "nervous breakdown" — sick of trying,
and willing to permit a dictator to dangle us upside down
by our tails?

Science is daily putting new and wonderful instruments
into our hands for the controlling of our environment and
therefore for the potential enrichment of our lives. But they
require adult human nervous systems for their safe handling.
A chimpanzee, as we have seen, cannot drive a car in a stream
of modern traffic without bringing disaster upon both himself
and others. Similarly, if the majority of human beings are
governed in their personal social, and political thinking by
signal reactions, they can hardly be expected to handle the
resources of modern civilization without bringing disaster
upon themselves. Yet not only are persons of great influence,
including rulers of nations, willing to exploit the signal re-
actions of others; many of them have as many and as serious
signal reactions as any of the people whom they govern. And
such rulers, using the press and radio to spread their own
verbal confusions as well as to arouse the tribal, religious,
and economic superstitions of their people, make madness epi-
demic. No wonder, then, that the skies of Europe and Asia
are filled with bombing planes.

190 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

THE SCIENTIFIC ATTITUDE

Can we do no better than rats? Of course we can, and in
some things we do. The scientist, when he finds a problem
"insoluble," frequently solves it. It was "impossible" to devise
means of traveling over twenty miles an hour, but now we
can travel four hundred miles an hour. It was "impossible"
for man to fly — people "proved" it again and .again — but now
we can fly across oceans. The scientist may almost be called
the professional accomplisher of the "impossible." He does
this because, as scientist, he is extensionally orientated. He
may be, and often is, intensionally orientated towards what
he calls "nonscientific subjects"; therefore, the scientist talking
^bout politics or ethics is often no more sensible than the rest
of us.

As we have seen, scientists have special ways of talking
about the phenomena they deal with, special "maps" describ-
ing their "territories." On the basis of these "maps," they
make predictions; when things turn out as predicted, they re-
gard their "maps" as "true." If things do not turn out as
predicted, however, they discard their "maps" and make new
ones; that is, they act on new sets of hypotheses that suggest
new courses of action. Again, they check their "map" with the
"territory." If the new one does not check, they cheerfully
discard it and make still more hypotheses, until they find
some that wor^. These they regard as "true," but "true" jor
the time being only. When, later on, they find new situations
in which they do not work, they are again ready to discard
them, to re-examine the extensional world, and to make new
"maps" that again suggest new courses of action.

When scientists work with a minimum of interference from
pecuniary or political influences — when, that is, they are free
ro pool their knowledge with their co-workers all over the

RATS AND MEN I9I

world and to check the accuracy of each other's "maps" by
observations independently made and freely exchanged — they
make rapid progress. Highly multi-valued and extensional in
their orientations, they are troubled less than any other men
by fixed dogmas and nonsense question?. The last thing a
scientist would do would be to cling to a "map" because he
inherited it from his grandfather or because it was used by
George Washington or Abraham Lincoln. By intensional ori-
entation, "If it was good enough for Washington and Lin-
coln, it's good enough for us." By extensional orientation, we
don't \now until we have checked.

THE LEFT-HAND DOOR AGAIN

Notice the differences between the technological, scientific
attitudes that we have towards some things and the intensional
attitudes that we have towards others. When we are having a
car repaired, we do not ask: "Is the remedy you suggest con-
sistent with the principles of thermodynamics.? What would
Faraday or Newton have done under similar circumstances?
Are you sure this does not represent a degenerative, defeatist
tendency in the technological traditions of our nation.? What
would happen if we did this to every car .? What has Aristotle
to say on this.?" These are nonsense questions. We only ask,
"What will be the results?"

But a different thing happens when we are trying to have
society repaired. Few people ask what will be the practical
results of a proposed social change. Remedies suggested are
almost always discussed in the light of questions to which
verifiable answers cannot be given: "Are your proposals con-
sistent with sound economic policy.? Do they accord with the
principles of justice and reason.? What would Alexander
Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, or Andrew Jackson have said.?
Would it be a step in the direction of communism or fascism .?

192 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

What would happen in the long run if everybody followed
your scheme? Why don't you read Aristotle on poHtics?" And
we spend so much time discussing nonsense questions that
often we never get around to finding out exactly what the
results of proposed actions would be.

During the course of our weary struggles with such non-
sense questions, someone or other is sure to come along with
a campaign to tell us, "Let's get bac\ to normalcy. . . . Let's
stick to the good old-fashioned, tried-and-true principles. . . .
Let's return to sound economics and sound finance. . . .
America must get bac\ to this. . . . America must get bac\
to that. . . ." Most of such appeals are, of course, merely in-
vitations to take another jump at the left-hand door — in other

words, INVITATIONS TO CONTINUE DRIVING OURSELVES CRAZY. In

our confusion we accept those invitations — with the same old
results.

EXTENSIONAL
ORIENTATION

It is evident that all the sciences have a relation,
greater or less, to fniman nature; and that, how-
ever wide any of them may seem to run from it,
they still return back by one passage or another.
. . . Here, then, is the only expedient, from which
we can hope for success in our philosophical re-
searches: to leave the tedious lingering method
which we have hitherto followed, and, instead of
taking now and then a castle or village on the
frontier, to march directly to the capital or center
of these sciences — to human nature itself — which,
being once masters of, we may elsewhere hope for
an easy victory.

DAVID HUME

RULES FOR EXTENSIONAL ORIENTA-
TION

JUST as a mechanic carries around a pair of pliers and a
screw driver for use in an emergency — just as we all carry
around in our heads tables of multiplication for daily use —
so can we all carry with us in our heads convenient rules for
extensional orientation. These rules need not be complicated;
a short, rough-and-ready set of formulas will do. Their prin-
cipal function will be to prevent us from going around in
circles of intensional thinking, to prevent signal reactions, to
prevent us from trying to answer unanswerable questions, to
prevent us from repeating old mistakes endlessly. They will
not magically show us what better solutions are possible, but

i9i

194 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

they will start us hotting for better courses of action than the
old ones. The following rules, then, are a brief summary of
the more important parts of this book. These rules should be
memorized.

1. A map is not the territory it stands for; words are not
things.

A map does not represent all of a territory; words never
say ALL about anything.

Maps of maps, maps of maps of maps, and so on, can be
made indefinitely, with or without relationship to a territory.

2. Contexts determine meaning.

I like fish. (Cooked, edible fish.)
He caught a fish, (Live fish.)
You poor fish! (Not fish at all.)
To fish for compliments. (To seek.)

3. The meanings of words are not in the words; they are
in us.

4. Beware of the word "is," which can cause more trouble
than any other word in the language:

The grass is green. (But what about the part our nervous sys-
tem plays?)
Mr. Miller is a Jew. (Beware of confusing levels of abstraction.)
Business is business. (A directive.)
A thing is what it is. (Is it? And for how long?)

5. don't try to cross bridges that aren't built yet. Distinguish
between directive and informative statements.

6. don't sock a car in the eye when it stalls.

7. The two-valued orientation is the starter, not the steering
apparatus.

8. BEWARE OF DEFINITIONS : In ouc Way, they say too much —
a "chair" is not always "something to sit in"; in another way,
they never say enough, because characteristics are left out in
any verbalization.

EXTENSIONAL ORIENTATION 195

9. Use INDEX NUMBERS and DATES as reminders that no word

EVER HAS EXACTLY THE SAME MEANING TWICE.

CoWj is not COW2, C0W2 is not COW3, . . .

JeWi is not JeWg, Jewj is not Jewg, . . .

Smithi939 is not Smithi94o> Smithig4o is not Smithi94i, . . .

10. When you are "disillusioned," "cynical," and "beset with

doubts," DOUBT YOUR DOUBT.

If these rules are too much to remember, the reader is asked
to memorize at least this much:

COWi IS NOT COW2, COW2 IS NOT COW3, . . .

This is the simplest and most general of the rules for exten-
sional orientation. The word "cow" gives us the intensional
meanings, informative and affective; it calls up in our minds
the features that this "cow" has in common with other "cows."
The index number, however, reminds us that this one is
different; it reminds us that "cow" does not tell us "all about"
the event; it reminds us of the characteristics left out in the
process of abstracting; it prevents us from equating the word
with the thing, that is, from confusing the abstraction "cow"
with the extensional cow and having a signal reaction.

SYMPTOMS OF DISORDER

Not to observe, consciously or unconsciously, such principles
of interpretation is to think and react like savages or children.
There are a number of ways in which we can detect signal
reactions in ourselves. One of the most obvious symptoms is
sudden displays of temper. When blood pressure rises, quar-
rels become excited and feverish, and arguments end up in
snarling and name calling, there is usually a signal reaction
somewhere in the background.

Another obvious symptom is worrj — when we keep going
round and round in circles. "I love her. ... I love her. . . .

196 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

Oh, if I could only forget that she is a waitress! . . . What
will my friends think if I marry a waitress? . . . But I love
her. ... If only she weren't a waitress." But waitressi is not
waitress2. "Gosh, what a terrible governor we've got! . . . We
thought he was a businessman, but he proves to be only a
politician. . . . Now that I think of it, the last governor wasn't
too bad. . . . Oh, but he was a politician, too, and how he
played politics! . . . Can't we ever get a governor who isn't a
politician?" But politiciani is not politician2. As soon as we
break these circles and think about facts instead of words,
new light is thrown on our problems.

Still another symptom of our signal reactions is a tendency
to be "oversensitive," "easily hurt," and "quick to resent in-
sults." The infantile mind, equating words with things, re-
gards unkind words as unkind acts. Attributing to harmless
sets of noises a power of injuring, such a person is "insulted"
when those noises are uttered at him. So-called "gentlemen"
in semi-savage and infantile societies used to dignify signal
reactions of this kind into "codes of honor." By "honor," they
meant extreme readiness to pull out swords or pistols when-
ever they imagined that they had been "insulted." Naturally,
they killed each other off much faster than was necessary,
illustrating again a principle often impHed in this book: the
lower the boiling point, the higher the mortality rate.

It has already been pointed out that the tendency to J:al|L
too much and too readily is an unhealthy sign. We should
also be wary of "thinking too much." It is a mistake to be-
lieve that productive thinkers necessarily "think harder" than
people who never get anywhere. They only think more effi-
ciently. "Thinking too much" often means that somewhere in
the back of our minds there is a "certainty" — an "incontro-
vertible fact," an "unalterable law," an "eternal principle" —
some statement which we believe "says all" about something.
Life, however, is constantly throwing into the face of our "in-

EXTENSIONAL ORIENTATION 197

controvertible certainties" facts that do not fit our preconcep-
tions: "communists" who don't need a shave, "politicians"
who aren't corrupt, "friends" who aren't faithful, "benevo-
lent societies" that aren't benevolent, "insurance companies"
that don't insure. Refusing to give up our sense of "cer-
tainty" and yet unable to deny the facts that do not fit, we
are forced to "think and think and think." And, as we have
seen before, there are only two ways out of such dilemmas:
first, to deny the facts altogether, and secondly, to reverse the
principle altogether, so that we go from "All insurance com-
panies are safe" to 'Wo insurance companies are safe." Hence
such infantile reactions as, "I'll never trust another woman!"
"Don't ever say politics to me again!" "I'm through with
newspapers for good!" "Men are all alike, the heels!"

The mature mind, on the other hand, knows that words
never say all about anything, and it is therefore adjusted to
uncertainty. In driving a car, for example, we never know
what is going to happen next; no matter how often we have
gone over the same road, we never find exactly the same
traffic conditions. Nevertheless, a competent driver travels
over all kinds of roads and even at high speeds without either
fear or nervousness. As driver, he is adjusted to uncertainty —
the unexpected blowout or the sudden hazard — and he is not
insecure.

Similarly the intellectually mature person does not "know
all about" anything. And he is not insecure, because he knows
that the only kind of security life offers is the dynamic se-
curity that comes from within: the security derived from
infinite flexibility of mind — from an infinite-valued orienta-
tion.

"Knowing all" about this, "knowing all" about that, we
have only ourselves to blame when we find certain problems
"insoluble." With some working knowledge of how language
acts, both in ourselves and others, we save both time and ef-

198 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

fort; we prevent ourselves from being driven mad in verbal
squirrel cages. With an extensional orientation, we are ad-
justed to the inevitable uncertainties of all our science and
wisdom. And whatever other problems the world thrusts
upon us, we at least escape those of our own making.

READING TOWARDS SANITY

A few words, finally, need to be said on the subject of
reading as an aid to extensional orientation. Studying books
too often has the effect of producing excessive intensional ori-
entation; this is especially true in literary study, for example,
when the study of words — novels, plays, poems, essays — be-
comes an end in itself. When the study of literature is under-
taken, however, not as an end in itself, but as a guide to life,
its effect is extensional in the best sense.

Literature works by intensional means; that is, by the ma-
nipulation of the informative and affective connotations of
words. By these means, it not only calls our attention to facts
not previously noticed, but it also is capable of arousing feel-
ings not previously experienced. These new feelings in turn
call our attention to still more facts not previously noticed.
Both the new feelings and the new facts, therefore, upset our
intensional orientations, so that our blindness is little by little
removed.

The extensionally orientated person, as has been repeatedly
said, is governed not by words only, but by the facts to which
the words have guided him. But supposing there were no
words to guide us? Should we be able to guide ourselves to
those facts? The answer is, in the vast majority of cases, no.
To begin with, our nervous systems are extremely imperfect,
and we see things only in terms of our training and interests.
If our interests are limited, we see extremely little; a man
looking for cigarette butts in the street sees little else of the

EXTENSIONAL ORIENTATION I99

world passing by. Furthermore, as everyone knows, when we
travel, meet interesting people, or have adventures before we
are old enough to appreciate such experiences, we often feel
that we might just as well not have had them. Experience it-
self is an extremely imperfect teacher. Experience does not
tell us what it is we are experiencing. Things simply happen.
And if we do not know what to loo\ for in our experience,
they often have no significance to us whatever.

Many people put a great deal of stock in experience as such;
they tend automatically to respect the person who has "done
things." "I don't want to sit around reading books," they say;
"I want to get out and do things I I want to travel! I want to
have experiences!" But often the experiences they go out and
get do them no good whatever. They go to London, and all
they remember is their hotel and the American Express Com-
pany office; they go to China, and their total impression is
that "there were a lot of Chinamen there"; they may be
caught in a South American revolution in the course of their
travels and remember only their personal discomforts. The
result often is that people who have never had these experi-
ences, people who have never been to those places, know
more about them than people who have. We all tend to go
around the world with our eyes shut unless someone opens
them for us.

This, then, is the tremendous function that language, in
both its scientific and its affective uses, performs. In the light
of abstract scientific generalizations, "trivial" facts lose their
triviality. When we have studied, for example, surface tension,
the alighting of a dragonfly on a pool of water is a subject for
thought and explanation. In the light of reading The Grapes
of Wrath, a. trip through California is a doubly meaningful
experience. And we turn and look at migrant families in all
other parts of the country as well, because Steinbeck has cre-
ated in us new ways of feeling about a subject that we may

200 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

formerly have ignored. In the Hght of the subtleties of feeling
aroused in us by the great Hterature and poetry of the past,
every human experience is filled with rich significances and
relationships.

The communications v^^e receive from others, insofar as they
do not simply retrace our old patterns of feeling and tell us
things we already know, increase the efficiency of our nervous
systems. Poets, as well as scientists, have truly been called "the
window washers of the mind"; without their communications
to widen our interests and increase the sensitivity of our per-
ceptions, we could very well remain as bUnd as puppies.

Much of this book may have sounded like warnings against
words. Such has not been its purpose. Words are, as has been
said from the beginning, the essential instruments of man's
humanity. This book only asks the reader to treat them as
such.

READINGS

I. From Chapter XIV of
THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN '

by MARK TWAIN

The feeling that one's own way of talking is the only sensible
way to talk has rarely been expressed so eloquently or with such
devastating logic as by Jim, the runaway slave.

WHY, Huck, doan' de French people talk de same way
we does?"

"No, Jim; you couldn't understand a word they said — not
a single word."

"Well, now, I be ding-busted! How do dat come?"

"/ don't know; but it's so. I got some of their jabber out of
a book. S'pose a man was to come to you and say PoUy-voo-
franzy — what would you think?"

"I wouldn' think nuffin; I'd take en bust him over de head
— dat is, if he warn't white. I wouldn't 'low no nigger to call
me dat."

"Shucks, it ain't calling you anything. It's only saying, do
you know how to talk French?"

"Well, den, why couldn't he say it?"

"Why, he is a-saying it. That's a Frenchman's way of saying
it."

"Well, it's a blame ridicklous way, en I doan' want to hear
no mo' 'bout it. Dey ain' no sense in it."

"Looky here, Jim; does a cat talk hke we do?"

"No, a cat don't."

^ Reprinted by permission of Harper and Brothers, Inc.

201

202 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

"Well, does a cow?"

"No, a cow don't, nuther."

"Does a cat talk like a cow, or a cow talk like a cat?"

"No, dey don't."

"It's natural and right for 'em to talk different from each
other, ain't it?"

"Course."

"And ain't it natural and right for a cat and a cow to talk
different from us?"

"Why, mos' sholy it is."

"Well, then, why ain't it natural and right for a Frenchman
to talk different from us? You answer me that."

"Is a cat a man, Huck?"

"No."

"Well, den, dey ain't no sense in a cat talkin' like a man.
Is a cow a man? — er is a cow a cat?"

"No, she ain't either of them."

"Well, den, she ain't got no business to talk Hke either one
er the yuther of 'em. Is a Frenchman a man?"

"Yes."

"Well, den! Dad blame it, why doan he talJ{^ like a man?
You answer me dat!"

II. From "Sixth-Century Political Economy,"
Chapter XXXIII, of

A CONNECTICUT YANKEE
IN KING ARTHUR'S COURT ^

by MARK TWAIN

There are still millions of Brother Dowleys among us, to whom
ten dollars "is" ten dollars regardless of context — here, the price

1 Reprinted by permission of Harper and Brothers, Inc.

READINGS 203

system. Energetically demanding higher wages, but doing nothing
to protect themselves against higher prices, they are often deprived
of their wage increases as fast as they get them. Accordingly, even
when living costs have risen fifty per cent, they may still derive a
sense of progress from the fact that they now get "three dollars"
where they used to get "two dollars."

"In your country, brother, what is the wage of a . . . swine-
herd?"

"Twenty-five milrays a day . . ."

The smith's face beamed with joy. He said:

"With us they are allowed the double of it! And what may
a mechanic get ... ?"

"On the average, fifty milrays . . ."

"Ho-ho! With us they are allowed a hundred! . . ."

And his face shone upon the company like a sunburst. But
I didn't scare at all. I rigged up my pile-driver, and allowed
myself fifteen minutes to drive him into the earth — drive him
all in — drive him in till not even the curve of his skull should
show above-ground. Here is the way I started in on him. I
asked :

"What do you pay a pound for salt.^"

"A hundred milrays."

"We pay forty. What do you pay for beef and mutton —
when you buy it.''" That was a neat hit; it made the color
come.

"It varieth somewhat, but not much; one may say seventy-
five milrays the pound."

"We pay thirty-three. What do you pay for tggsV

"Fifty milrays the dozen."

"We pay twenty. . . . What do you pay for a stuff gown
for the wife of the laborer or the mechanic?"

"We pay eight cents, four mills."

"Well, observe the difference: you pay eight cents and four

204 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

mills, we pay only four cents." I prepared now to sock it to
him. I said: "Look here, dear friend, what's become of your
high wages you were bragging so about a few minutes ago?"
— and I looked around on the company with placid satisfac-
tion, for I had slipped up on him gradually and tied him
hand and foot, you see, without his ever noticing that he was
being tied at all. "What's become of those noble high wages
of yours — I seem to have knocked the stuffing all out of them,
it appears to me."

But if you will believe me, he merely looked surprised, that
is all! He didn't grasp the situation at all, didn't know he
had walked into a trap, didn't discover that he was in a trap.
I could have shot him, from sheer vexation. With cloudy eye
and a struggling intellect he fetched this out:

"Marry, I seem not to understand. It is proved that our
wages be double thine; how then may it be that thou'st
knocked therefrom the stuffing? . . ."

Well, I was stunned; partly with this unlooked-for stupidity
on his part, and partly because his fellows so manifestly
sided with him and were of his mind — if you might call it
mind. My position was simple enough, plain enough; how
could it be simplified more? However, I must try:

"Why, look here, brother Dowley, don't you see? Your
wages are merely higher than ours in name, not in fact."

"Hear him! They are the double — ye have confessed it
yourself."

"Yes-yes, I don't deny that at all. But that's got nothing to
do with it; the amount of the wages in mere coins, with mean-
ingless names attached to them to know them by, has got
nothing to do with it. The thing is, how much can you buy
with your wages? — that's the idea. While it is true that with
you a good mechanic is allowed about three dollars and a half
a year, and with us only about a dollar and seventy-five — "

"There— ye're confessing it again, ye're confessing it again!"

READINGS 205

"Confound it, I've never denied it, I tell you! What I say
is this. With us half a dollar buys more than a dollar buys
with you — and therefore it stands to reason and the common-
est kind of common sense, that our wages are higher than
yours."

He looked dazed, and said, despairingly:

"Verily, I cannot make it out. Ye've just said ours are the
higher, and with the same breath ye take it back."

III.

THE DEACON'S MASTERPIECE:

OR THE WONDERFUL "ONE-HOSS SHAY"

A Logical Story

by OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

Here is the account of a vehicle manufactured by purely in-
tensional methods. Holmes often showed his impatience with
logicians, whose facility in the manipulation of "maps" never
seemed to him commensurate with their acquaintance with the
"territories" their maps were supposed to stand for. "I value a
man," he says in The Autocrat of the Brea1{jast-Table, "mainly
for his primary relations with truth . . . not for any secondary
artifice in handling his ideas."

Have you heard of the wonderful one-hoss shay,

That was built in such a logical way

It ran a hundred years to a day.

And then, of a sudden, it — ah, but stay,

I'll tell you what happened without delay,

Scaring the parson into fits,

Frightening people out of their wits —

Have you ever heard of that, I say.?

206 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

Seventeen hundred and fifty-five
Georgius Secundus was then aHve —
Snuffy old drone from the German hive;
That was the year when Lisbon-town
Saw the earth open and gulp her down,
And Braddock's army was done so brown.
Left without a scalp to its crown.
It was on the terrible Earthquake-day
That the Deacon finished the one-hoss shay.

Now in the building of chaises, I tell you what,

There is always somewhere a weakest spot —

In hub, tire, felloe, in spring or thill.

In panel, or crossbar, or floor, or sill,

In screw, bolt, thoroughbrace — lurking still,

Find it somewhere you must and will —

Above or below, or within or without —

And that's the reason, beyond a doubt,

A chaise breads down, but doesn't wear out.

But the Deacon swore (as Deacons do,
With an "I dew vum," or an "I tell yeou"),
He would build one shay to beat the taown
'N' the keounty 'n' all the kentry raoun';
It should be so built that it couldn break daown-
"Fur," said the Deacon, " 't's mighty plain
Thut the weakes' place mus' stan' the strain;
'N' the way t' fix it, uz I maintain.

Is only jest
T' make that place uz strong uz the rest."

So the Deacon inquired of the village folk
Where he could find the strongest oak.
That couldn't be spUt nor bent nor broke —

READINGS 207

That was for spokes and floor and sills;

He sent for lancewood to make the thills;

The crossbars were ash, from the straightest trees,

The panels of whitewood, that cuts like cheese,

But lasts like iron for things like these;

The hubs of logs from the "Settler's ellum" —

Last of its timber — they couldn't sell 'em.

Never an ax had seen their chips,

And the wedges flew from between their Hps,

Their blunt ends frizzled like celery tips;

Step and prop iron, bolt and screw.

Spring, tire, axle, and linchpin too,

Steel of the finest, bright and blue;

Thoroughbrace bison skin, thick and wide;

Boot, top, dasher, from tough old hide

Found in the pit when the tanner died.

That was the way he "put her through."

"There!" said the Deacon, "naow she'll dew."

Do! I tell you, I rather guess

She was a wonder, and nothing less!

Colts grew horses, beards turned gray.

Deacon and deaconess dropped away,

Children and grandchildren — where were they.?

But there stood the stout old one-hoss shay

As fresh as on Lisbon earthquake day!

EIGHTEEN HUNDRED — it Came and found
The Deacon's masterpiece strong and sound.
Eighteen hundred increased by ten —
"Hahnsum kerridge" they called it then.
Eighteen hundred and twenty came —
Running as usual; much the same.
Thirty and forty at last arrive.
And then come fifty, and fifty-five.

208 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

Little of all we value here

Wakes on the morn of its hundredth year

Without both feeling and looking queer.

In fact, there's nothing that keeps its youth,

So far as I know, but a tree and truth.

(This is a moral that runs at large;

Take it. — You're welcome. — No extra charge.)

FIRST OF NOVEMBER — the Earthquake-day.
There are traces of age in the one-hoss shay,
A general flavor of mild decay,
But nothing local, as one may say.
There couldn't be — for the Deacon's art
Had made it so like in every part
That there wasn't a chance for one to start.
For the wheels were just as strong as the thills,
And the floor was just as strong as the sills.
And the panels just as strong as the floor.
And the whippletree neither less nor more.
And the back crossbar as strong as the fore,
And spring and axle and hub encore.
And yet, as a whole, it is past a doubt
In another hour it will be worn out!

First of November, Tifty-five.'
This morning the parson takes a drive.
Now, small boys, get out of the way!
Here comes the wonderful one-hoss shay.
Drawn by a rat-tailed, ewe-necked bay.
"Huddup!" said the parson. — Off went they.

The parson was working his Sunday's text —
Had got to fifthly, and stopped perplexed
At what the — Moses — was coming next.

READINGS 209

All at once the horse stood still,
Close by the meet'n '-house on the hill.
— First a shiver, and then a thrill,
Then something decidedly like a spill —
And the parson was sitting upon a rock,
At half-past nine by the meet'n'-house clock —
Just the hour of the Earthquake shock!
What do you think the parson found,
When he got up and stared around?
The poor old chaise in a heap or mound,
As if it had been to the mill and ground.
You see, of course, if you're not a dunce,
How it went to pieces all at once —
All at once, and nothing first —
Just as bubbles do when they burst.

End of the wonderful one-hoss shay.
Logic is logic. That's all I say.

IV. From

THE GRAPES OF WRATH ^

by JOHN STEINBECK

Tom Joad makes an acute analysis of the presymbolic character
of the filling-station operator's words.

". . . But what's the country comin' to? That's what I
wanta know. What's it comin' to? Folks can't make a livin'
farmin'. I ask you, what's it comin' to? I can't figure her out.
Ever 'body I ask, they can't figure her out. Fella wants to trade

1 Copyright, 1939, by John Steinbeck. Reprinted by permission of The
Viking Press.

2IO LANGUAGE IN ACTION

his shoes so he can get a hunderd miles on. I can't figure her
out." He took off his silver hat and wiped his forehead with
his palm. . . .

Al started the motor and backed the truck to the gas pump.
"Fill her up. She'll take about seven," said Al. "We'll give
her six so she don't spill none. . . ."

Casy said, "I been walkin' aroun' in the country. Ever'body's
askin' that. What we comin' to? Seems to me we don't never
come to nothin'. Always on the way. Always goin' and goin'.
Why don't folks think about that? They's movement now.
People moving. We know why, an' we know how. Movin'
'cause they got to. That's why folks always move. Movin'
'cause they want somepin better'n what they got. An' that's
the on'y way they'll ever git it. Wantin' it an' needin' it,
they'll go out an' git it. It's bein' hurt that makes folks mad
to fightin'. I been walkin' aroun' the country, an' hearin' folks
talk like you."

The fat man pumped the gasoline and the needle turned
on the pump dial, recording the amount. "Yeah, but what's it
comin' to? That's what I want ta know."

Tom broke in irritably. "Well, you ain't never gonna know.
Casy tries to tell ya an' you jest ast the same thing over. I
seen fellas like you before. You ain't askin' nothin'. You're
jus' singin' a kinda song. 'What we comin' to?' You don'
wanta know. Country's movin' aroun', goin' places. They's
folks dyin' all aroun'. Maybe you'll die pretty soon, but you
won't know nothin'. I seen too many fellas like you. You
don't want to know nothin'. Just sing yourself to sleep with
a song — 'What we comin' to?'"

READINGS 211

V. From Chapter VII of The Folklore of Capitalism
THE TRAPS WHICH LIE IN DEFINITIONS
AND POLAR WORDS '

by THURMAN W. ARNOLD

Mr. Arnold is, as his record as Assistant Attorney General in
charge of the Antitrust Division shows, one of the most exten-
sionally orientated people in public life today. The following
passages from his The Folklore of Capitalism are cited, first, in
support of the principle that "the two-valued orientation is the
starter, but not a steering wheel," and second, in support of the
contention that "orientation by definition" should be avoided.

One who would escape from the culture of his own time
long enough to view it from the outside, as the historian views
the French Revolution or the anthropologist views a primitive
people, must beware of the hidden traps which lie in the
terminology of that culture which he must necessarily use. He
is confronted with the same difficulty the anthropologist
would face if he had to write his observations in the language
of the tribe he was observing. He would find all the words
used in connection with their sacred institutions so heavily
freighted with Uttle mental pictures of the ideals and phobias
of the tribe that they would imperfectly describe the actual
moving effect of those ideals on the tribe. This is such a dan-
gerous handicap to one who describes modern society that it
is necessary to digress from our main theme for a chapter in
order to explain it.

We may take an example from the development of physics.
In the last century the terminology of physics was tied up
with little mental pictures of a world composed of matter and

^ Reprinted by permission of the author and the Yale University Press.

212 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

energy. Matter was little lumps, of which the atom was the
smallest. Time was a sequence. Space was a frame. These
word-images were taken from the general images of the day.
They could not be used to describe a world in which time was
a dimension and matter a form of energy.

Today we realize that word-images of ordinary discourse
cannot be used to describe the phenomena of physics. They
are too hopelessly confused with the view of the universe as
made up of little lumps of matter. Einstein's great contribu-
tion to science is the fact that he made men realize that men-
tal pictures had their distinct limitations as scientific tools. He
escaped from these little pictures through symbols of mathe-
matics which had the advantage of carrying no concrete
mental images along with them. The fourth dimension and
the Riemann metric, both of which Einstein used, either mean
absolutely nothing when translated into language or they be-
come completely absurd. However, when one gets used to
them, they appear to have meaning enough to use, just as the
symbol for zero is treated as a number in mathematics. . . .

Therefore, it becomes necessary for anyone thinking ob-
jectively about human institutions to realize the traps which
lie beneath words. This is a familiar enough idea. What is
not so familiar, however, is the kind of trap which lies be-
hind peculiar types of words often called "polar" words. These
have no meaning by themselves. They require an opposite
term in order to be used at all. Let us illustrate.

The term "up" has no meaning apart from the term
"down." The term "fast" has no meaning apart from the
term "slow." And in addition such pairs of terms have no
meaning even when used together, except when confined to
a very particular situation. The realization of this fact in
physics is called the principle of relativity. "Up" and "down"
are very useful terms to describe the movement with reference
to an elevator. They are utterly useless and, indeed, lead us

READINGS 213

into all sorts of errors when we talk about interstellar spaces.
The reason is that these words require a frame of reference
which does not work in astronomy. The idea that the sun
went "down" and that the sky was "up" was among the
great stumbling blocks to astronomical science for centuries.

The observer of social institutions must face a similar diffi-
culty because most of our language about the organization
and objectives of government is made up of such polar terms.
"Justice" and "injustice" are typical. A reformer who wants
to abolish injustice and create a world in which nothing but
justice prevails is like a man who wants to make everything
"up." Such a man might feel that if he took the lowest in
the world and carried it up to the highest point and kept on
doing this, everything would eventually become "up." This
would certainly move a great many objects and create an
enormous amount of activity. It might or might not be useful,
according to the standards which we apply. However, it
would never result in the abolishment of "down."

The battle between justice and injustice is a similar struggle.
It leads to change. It also leads to civil wars. What we call
"progress" is a consequence of this activity, as well as what
we call "reaction." Our enthusiasms are aroused by these
words and therefore they are excellent tools with which to
push people around. Both the Rebels and the Loyahsts in
Spain are fighting for justice. That is what enables them
to kill so many people in such a consecrated way.

Since justice is a nice word, we refuse to apply it to people
who are struggling for things we do not like. The pacifist will
refuse to admit that any war can be a war for justice. The
born fighter will say that men who refuse to fight for justice
do not really care for justice at all. Each side gets morale
from the use of such terms and obtains the confidence neces-
sary to make faces at the other side, knowing that God is with
him. However, these polar terms are purely inspirational.

214 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

They are not guides. Each side always claims to have "justice"
on its side. Even organized criminals fight each other in the
interest of justice.

All this does not, of course, mean that such words are
foolish. They are, on the contrary, among the most important
realities in the world. Take the term "efficiency," for example,
which is an ideal of the business world. It has no meaning
whatever unless there exists something which is called "in-
efficiency." One does not speak of a mountain as either effi-
cient or inefficient. I recently engaged in a discussion with a
newspaper editor, whose paper had a policy of taking care
of all its old employees. This editor was very much in favor
of an "efficient" society. He therefore wondered whether the
policy of taking care of old employees was really "efficient."
What was happening in his mind was simply this. Being a
man of kindly impulses, he wanted the people whom he knew
to be well fed. Being engaged in a struggle for economic
power, he liked to see his paper make money. If he had de-
sired to fire some of the older employees, he would have ob-
tained the moral courage to do so by saying that newspaper
"efficiency" demanded it. He desired to keep his old em-
ployees. Therefore, the word "efficient," with its little mental
pictures of making profits, created a conflict. In order to re-
solve that conflict he had to invent a new term. He was for
humanitarianism and against cruelty. Here was another pair
of polar words which gave him support because it put him
on the side of the nice word. His competitor, who was firing
his employees when they got old, would of course have been
troubled by this new set of polar words. He would not want
to be called cruel. He would Hke to be considered humani-
tarian. Therefore, in order to resolve this conflict, he would
proceed to prove that in the long run temporary cruelty led
to humanitarianism. This is a complicated idea and therefore
it takes a great many economic books to prove it. The idea

READINGS 215

that humanitarianism is better than efficiency is an inspira-
tional idea and can be proved by a sermon. However, it re-
quires a number of learned books to prove that present cruelty
results in long-run humanitarianism. Economic theory is al-
ways equal to such a task. The humanitarian is shown to
be an advocate of "paternalism" and against "rugged individ-
ualism."

These arguments never get anywhere in persuading the
other side. However, they perform a real function in bolster-
ing up the morale of the side on which they are used. The
trick is to find a pair of polar words, in which the nice word
justifies your own position and the bad word is applied to the
other fellow.

Thus keeping on old employees is not "efficiency." Answer:
But it is humanitarian, which is the only proper objective of
efficiency. Apparent efficiency which leads to inhumanitarian
results is really "inefficiency." Reply: But humanitarianism
which destroys rugged individualism is in reaUty paternalism,
which in the long run leads to more suffering than it cures
and hence is inhumanitarian. Rebutter: But rugged indi-
vidualism which destroys the morale of the individual by
depriving him of security in the interests of selfish profits in
the long run is in its essence Fascism. Surrebutter: Now the
cat is out of the bag. You are attacking the profit motive and
that leads to Communism.

This sort of thing can be kept up all night. It doesn't get
anywhere and it doesn't mean anything. However, it makes
both sides feel that God is with them. It is a form of
prayer. ...

Definition is ordinarily supposed to produce clarity in think-
ing. It is not generally recognized that the more we define our
terms the less descriptive they become and the more difficulty
we have in using them. The reason for this paradox is that

2l6 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

we never attempt to define words which obtain a proper emo-
tional response from our listeners. Logical definition enters
when we are using words which we are sure "ought" to mean
something, but none of us can put our finger on just what
that meaning is. In such situations priestly-minded men be-
lieve that definition will make the meaning clearer. Most of
this kind of definition occurs in the use of the polar words
which we have just been describing.

We may illustrate with a homely example. There is no
conflict in a farmer's mind about the meaning of the words
"horse" and "duck." The one is not used as a polar term to
the other. If you tell a farmer to bring you a horse, he never
comes out of the barn leading a duck.

Suppose that the farmer attempted to define the diflference.
If he took the task at all seriously, he would find millions of
differences. His definition would become so involved that he
could no longer talk about the animals intelligibly. He would
probably end up by thinking that horses were really ducks
and vice versa, because this is an ordinary effect of the close
concentration on particular pairs of terms; they tend to merge,
and the distinctions between the two grow less and less sharp.

Of course, you say, the farmer would never attempt such a
thing. This is true in the ordinary situation. But suppose that
a conflict arose between an abstraction and a need which re-
quired the use of the words in pairs. We can easily imagine
such a hypothetical situation.

Suppose, for example, we had a statute that taxed horses at
ten dollars a head and ducks at ten cents. This does not create
any conflict, because it seems to be a fair enough classification
according to the prevailing folklore of taxation. However,
suppose, in addition, that due to the automobile, or some other
cause, horses became completely worthless and ducks became
very valuable. Suppose that the original statute had been
passed by ancestors of such great respectability that it would

READINGS 217

be tearing down the Constitution to repeal it and use new
words. Obviously, if we want to collect revenue in such a
situation, we must begin to define the real essence of the
difference between a horse and a duck. We set our legal
scholars to work. They discover that there are all sorts of
immaterial differences apparent to the superficial eye. The
mind of the scholar, however, is able to penetrate to the real
essence of the distinction, which is value. The horse is the
more valuable animal. It is clear that the fathers thought that
this was the difference, because Thomas Jefferson once re-
marked to his wife that his horses were worth much more
than his ducks. Differences between feathers and hair were
never mentioned by any of the founders. Therefore, it is
apparent that the webfooted animals are really horses, and the
creatures with hoofs are really ducks. (Such observations are
called "research.")

This works all right so far as the taxing situation is con-
cerned. Revenue begins to flow in again. However, scholarly
definitions are supposed to go through the surface and to
the core of things. Ordinary men feel a conflict, because deep
down in their hearts they feel that there is something wrong
somewhere. This conflict makes them celebrate the truth of
the definition by ceremony. If the conflict is a minor one, a
procession once a year in which ducks are led around with
halters and equipped with little saddles will be sufficient. A
supreme court is also helpful in such situations. However, if
the conflict is sufficiently keen, we shall find farmers all over
the country forced to feed ducks on baled hay. Ducks will not
die because of this, however. They will actually be kept alive
by low-class politicians sneaking into the barn at night and
giving them the proper food. (Thus a great organization of
bootleggers gave us our liquor only a few years ago.) If this
situation is finally accepted as inevitable, scholars will be
called in to prove that the particular food which is being fed

2l8 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

to the ducks is actually baled hay, even though to a superficial
observer it looks like something else. This definition will mix
men up along some other lines and the literature will continue
to pile up so long as the conflict exists. When the conflict dis-
appears, the need of definition will go with it.

The illustration sounds absurd, but the writer has tried
many cases involving exactly that type of situation. A plaster
company was scraping gypsum from the surface of the
ground. If it was a mine, it paid one tax; if a manufacturing
company, it paid another. Expert witnesses were called who
almost came to blows, such was their disgust at the stupidity
of those who could not see that the process was essentially
mining, or manufacturing. A 'great record was built up to
be reviewed by the State Supreme Court on this important
question of "fact."

A typical piece of theology of this type is the transformation
of the due process clause in the fifth amendment from a direc-
tion regarding criminal trials to a prohibition against the
regulation of great corporations. The word "property" in a
like manner has changed from something which was tangible
to the right of a great organization to be free from govern-
mental interference. Such changes appear to have something
wrong about them, because the older response to the sound of
the word "property" is still instinctively felt. A spiritual con-
flict is created which requires a great deal of literature or
ceremony to resolve.

How may the observer of social institutions avoid such
traps? The answer is that in writing about social institutions
he should never define anything. He should try to choose
words and illustrations which will arouse the proper mental
associations with his readers. If he doesn't succeed with these,
he should try others. If he ever is led into an attempt at defi-
nition, he is lost.

READING S 219

VI.

"GOVERNMENT" VS. "BUSINESS" '
A Short Study in Applied Semantics

by STUART CHASE

Mr. Chase has spoken of his work in semantics as by and for
the layman. His The Tyranny of Words contains a wealth of
illuminating and amusing applications and illustrations drawn
from his experiences in business, public controversy, economics,
and government service. In the following, he shows the reader
how to orientate himself extensionally regarding "government"
and "business."

Government is destroying the confidence of Business. . . .

If Government would leave Business alone, the depression
would soon be over. . . .

Business is sabotaging recovery. . . .

If Business were not so blind, it would realize that Govern-
ment is chiefly engaged in bolstering up Capitalism. . . .

Government and Business must co-operate if this nation is
to march forward. . . .

To show that these paraphrases are not unfair, here are two
run-of-the-mine samples clipped from the New York Times
of April 28, 1938: Alfred P. Sloan: "The exploitation of in-
dustry by regimentation means the death knell of individual
enterprise." Henry Ford : "If finance would get out of govern-
ment, and government would get out of business, everything
would go again."

Mr. Sloan identifies "industry" with "business," and "regi-
mentation" with "government." Mr. Ford compUcates the

^ " 'Government' vs. 'Business,' " Common Sense, June, 1938. Reprinted by
permission of Common Sense.

220 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

situation by introducing something called "finance" which is
in government's hair and should get out. Most commentators
do not make this nice distinction; they lump "finance" with
"business"; i.e., bankers are assumed to be businessmen.

Similar statements can be found by the square yard in any
newspaper, in almost any magazine, radio address, column
by General (Iron Pants) Johnson, speech at the annual ban-
quet of the American Widget Manufacturers, baccalaureate
sermon. . . . Government and Business glowering at each
other over the barbed wire and shell holes of no man's land.
Such pronouncements are gravely received by millions of
Americans who are certified by life insurance examiners as
sane. It is widely held that something of moment is being
said and that the cause of human understanding and knowl-
edge is advanced.

Wherever you drive in the country, you are likely to see
a billboard advertising a business magazine. The sign shows
a gigantic baby about to burst into tears, with the caption:
"What hurts Business hurts me." You are not to conclude
that Business is a crying baby, but that Business provides
milk and shoes for children, especially for your child. But
what is Business and what are the things that hurt it-f* The
sign does not say, nor do the columnists and orators. They
could not tell you. It would be a tough job of analysis for
any one to tell you. This article will indicate some ways of
going about that job.

Initially we must recognize that there are two prevalent
motives in the minds of those who use the terms "govern-
ment" and "business." Some of the talkers wish to create a
prejudice for or against a definite measure (say a tax bill),
for or against a definite person or group of persons (say Mr.
Roosevelt or Mr. Willkie and his friends). They are using
loose talk consciously and deUberately to confuse the issue,
and will of course continue to do so. They are not interested

READINGS 221

in saying what they mean, and would be greatly alarmed if
attempts were made to clarify their verbiage.

Other talkers, and I think they are in the majority, really
want more knowledge about political and industrial affairs.
They want to know clearly what is going on so that suitable
inferences may be drawn and suitable action taken. They are
like persons in a theater when a fire breaks out — where arc
the exits, what shall we do? — except that political and indus-
trial fires, while just as dangerous, do not burn so fast. To
them, semantics offers certain fire-fighting tools — to continue
the analogy. Semantics does not merely encourage the habit
of rejecting windy abstractions; it also provides a series of
tests by which you can be sure that you are thinking straight
when you tackle a mental problem with the serious intention
of solving it. . . .

People talk as though they saw an iron-booted entity "gov-
ernment" jumping on a frail, defenseless "business," or, per
contra, a gross, recalcitrant "business" hurling a shower of
monkey wrenches at a hard-working, conscientious "govern-
ment." In the world that we actually see with our eyes or
touch with our hands, there is no entity "government" and
no "business." A man with a camera could not take a picture
of either. He can take a picture of Dr. Bennett of the Soil
Conservation Service, or a picture of Mr. Alfred P. Sloan. He
can take a picture of Grand Coulee Dam — indeed I have a
copy — where thousands of men working for a "business"
contractor are building the biggest "government" structure in
history, bossed by "government" engineers. He can take a
picture of a fleet of "business" trucks running on U.S. i, a
"government" road, or a picture of a little "business" man
made happy by an RFC "government" loan.

A brief grounding in semantics makes it clear that most
of the talk, emotion, fury, this pounding of tables, these apo-
plexies in club armchairs, these editorials, upheavals of col-
umnists, banquet orators, soapbox fireworks, are without

222 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

meaning. The uproar is not about events in space and time,
but about events in Cloud-Cuckoo-Land. No fiery combatant
knows what "government" or "business" means to his equally
fiery opponent. He could not make an intelligent appraisal of
what these terms mean to himself — not, if you please, because
he does not stop to think, but because the words themselves
are so abstract that they defy comprehensive appraisal by even
the most careful appraiser. That is the kind of loose, general
words they happen to be.

It follows that specific action taken by any combatant must
be loose, random, and confused. It will be on a par with action
taken by Congo villagers when they beat drums to exorcise
demons in the forest. The demons seem real to the villagers.
"Government" and "business" seem real to most Americans.

Before Citizen A and Citizen B can intelligently communi-
cate to one another about "government," it is necessary that
they both go down the verbal ladder to events in the real
world which both can see and agree upon. At this lower
level, Citizen A can point to his income tax blank and say to
Citizen B: "By 'government' I mean this. Take it, look at it,
add it up. Isn't it the damnedest thing?" But Citizen B may
say: "I pay no income tax. I'm on the Federal Arts Project.
It saved my life. Look at these sketches for my new high
school mural. By 'government,' I mean thisl" Income tax
blanks and high school murals and millions of other tangible
objects, acts, events, constitute the reality behind the term
"government." Ditto for "business." How are you going to
get A and B to agree in this situation? You cannot get them
to agree. So they shout. But observe: if they stop shouting
about "government," it may be possible for B to agree with A
that his income tax is a complicated accounting monstrosity
and for A to agree with B that his high school mural sketch
is admirable.

If two or more persons are going to understand one another
and make sense in an abstract discussion, they must find a

READINGS 223

common object or event to which their words refer. Otherwise
their discussions will be meaningless because (i) they have
different referents for their words, and so are talking about
different events, or (2) they have no referents at all. For such
a term as "the sublime" there are no referents at all. Without
a common referent, A and B can make noises at one another,
but they cannot communicate. It is as though one talked in
Chinese and the other in Eskimo. Each can let the other know
that he is very much stirred up, but not what he is stirred up
about.

The student of semantics cannot get excited about all the
acts of "government" because he does not know, and never
can know, what all the acts are. Ditto for "business." He can
get excited about Mr. Roosevelt, or Mr. Hopkins, about the
acts of certain government officials, or about the behavior of
Jim Hill or of Richard Whitney. But is the behavior of Rich-
ard Whitney to be taken as the mode for the behavior of
"business".? I ask any corporation official if this is justifiable.
Yet that same official may be growling to Mrs. Official over
the Times and coffee cups tomorrow morning: "Look at that
fellow Earle in Pennsylvania. That's government for you.
That's why we can't make any progress in this country."

Words are not things. You cannot sleep on the word "bed"
or eat the word "roast beef." The thing comes before the word
and is recognized by the senses on the nonverbal level. A dog
knows what "roast beef" is, right enough, but he makes no
conversation about it. Man alone of the animals invents labels
for things in his environment and makes conversations about
them. If A and B discuss a side of beef on the table in front
of them, they both see the referent; they can touch it, taste
it, smell it. Here communication difficulty is at a minimum.
Similarly, scientists talk clearly to one another — sometimes
aided by a special language called mathematics — because they
constantly check their talk with physical experiments. They

224 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

perform operations and find common referents. They must, if
they are to continue to be scientists. When they turn their
backs on the laboratory and begin to argue, they resemble
philosophers. Most philosophers, incidentally, do not like se-
mantics. It is beneath their attention. It certainly is — ^far down
the verbal ladder.

"Well," cries one enthusiastic convert to semantics, "let's
get rid of abstract terms and stick to Rover — the actual dog
out on the lawn there." We cannot get rid of abstractions; we
require them constantly. This article I am writing is full of
them. No. Relief is available not by striking abstractions from
the language, but by using them accurately; by realizing which
level of the verbal ladder we are on; by going down the ladder
at frequent intervals to find the real events at the bottom. We
should use abstractions cautiously, and the last thing we
should do is to get excited about them. To become emotional
about a high order abstraction is pretty good evidence that we
have mistaken a word for a thing, personified the label, and
so delivered ourselves over, bag and baggage, to wcrd-magic.

Rover is never as goofy as this. He does not get excited
about "private property" as a sacred principle. He gets excited
when somebody steals his bone. It is sane to get excited about
stolen bones or stolen bonds. It is not sane to get excited about
verbal machinery. The structure of language as it has devel-
oped down the ages, whether English, French, or Hottentot,
makes us tend to believe in things which are not there. Ad-
justment to the environment is a difficult business, as any dog
or robin or bee knows. Men have made that adjustment far
more difficult by peopling the environment with ghosts and
demons derived from bad language.

Consider savages in New Guinea. In addition to floods,
storms, insects, wild beasts, pestilences, the distraught native
must contend with evil spirits in trees, caves, clouds, and soul
boxes. This doubles the job. We are just beginning to realize
from the semantic studies of Ogden, Richards, Korzybski, and

READINGS 225

Others that similar conditions obtain among civiUzed peoples
today. They must deal not only with droughts, dust storms,
floods, erosion, mortgages, men out of work, syphilis, slums,
busted banks, wars, but with demons lurking behind such
terms as "red," "Wall Street," "fascism," "democracy," "plu-
tocracy," "collective security," "isolation," "the profit system,"
"dictatorship," "government," "business," "regimentation,"
"the bosses," and hundreds more. Foggy language about "dic-
tatorship" killed the reorganization bill in Congress recently.
(Part of it was, of course, intended deliberately to be foggy.)
Foggy language about "spending" and "balanced budgets"
may cut the national income to fifty billions or less and give us
more years like 1932. We work so much harder than we
would need to work if we could understand what we are talk-
ing about.

Opium is a beneficial drug in certain limited fields of medi-
cal practice. Indiscriminately used, it is a curse. Similarly, the
abstract terms "government" and "business" are useful in
limited contexts, and breeders of confusion in others. If one
says "governments all over the world in 1938 are spending
more for armaments," the statement is clear, and can be
checked by inspection of government budgets, nation by
nation. But if one says, "the sole purpose of government is
tyranny and oppression," clear use gives way to a ghost hunt.

Where are the referents behind the word "government".''
Great God, where are they not? Possibly five million individ-
uals in America today are acting as representatives of the
community in one capacity or another. There are thousands
of laws on statute books, three hundred million acres of land,
hundreds of great ships, schoolhouses, courthouses, dams,
highways, mines. These individuals, buildings, printed laws,
pieces of land, are referents for "government," in one context
or another. Here is a typical abstraction ladder:

226 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

1. My neighbor, Roger Holmes, dogcatcher for the town.

2. Dogcatchers as a class.

3. Local police officers.

4. Town governments.

5. County governments.

6. State governments.

7. Federal governments.

8. The concept of government.

That is a long way from Roger Holmes. Furthermore, I
have heard Roger, a good Republican, violently attack the
encroachment of "government" on "personal liberty." Is he
attacking himself? Does he know what he is attacking.? Or
is he just making a loud noise about a pair of spooks?

It is highly probable that Mr. Holmes is not objecting so
much to "government" as he is to Mr. Roosevelt. Why doesn't
he say so? To identify Mr. Roosevelt with "government" is
to leave out some five million other individuals as referents
for the term. No one of them is so important as Mr. Roose-
velt today, but they do a tremendous number of important
jobs, whoever happens to be President. Persons on government
pay rolls furnish us with pure water supplies, fire protection,
schools for our children, concrete highways. They protect us
from contagious diseases. Does this undermine our personal
liberty? Do these acts make "government" an interloper and
a menace? If we fired every government official who is per-
forming some economic activity today, we should soon be in
a fine jam. Consider the state of the roads alone, without
traffic controls of any kind. Our hospitals would be filled to
the roof — except that many of them, being government insti-
tutions, would have shut up shop. Quarrel with Mr. Roosevelt
if you wish, for that is your traditional privilege as a sovereign
voter, but do not talk nonsense about throwing out "govern-
ment" because you would like to throw out Mr. Roosevelt.

Congress, says Mr. A, is all right, for it licked the President
in the reorganization bill. Part of Congress would be more

READINGS 227

accurate, for the bill was defeated by eight votes. But Congress-
men are important referents for that "government" which so
tyrannizes over Mr. A's liberties. Does he mean that govern-
ment is bad but that a bare majority of Congress is good?
Does Mr. A. recall, however, the shouts of approval with
which he welcomed the news that Congress had adjourned,
thus "allowing business to go back to work".?

Mr. A's opinion of the Supreme Court is high. At least, he
bitterly resented a proposal to change its membership. Yet the
justices of that court are also important referents for "govern-
ment." Are these gentlemen interfering with his business,
tearing up his liberties, prostrating him with taxes, taking
orders from Moscow?

One could go on like this for pages. Once the semantic
analysis is grasped, any high order abstraction can be chased
down the ladder, where tangible referents often make a mock-
ery of passionate opinions as to the abstraction itself. It is
plain goofy to become passionate about things which are not
there or about things which represent only a very small
fraction of the total situation under discussion.

Turning now to "business," we find a similar situation, ex-
cept that "business" is of a higher order and even vaguer than
"government." You can at least line up and count govern-
ment employees. How do you line up businessmen? The un-
conscious stereotype back of the label is probably the inde-
pendent merchant of the early nineteenth century. There are
some still left in America, but large corporations are liquidat-
ing them rapidly. Most Americans in "business" work for
corporations and have not much independent action left. Im-
portant decisions are made higher up. Are professional men
in business? Are farmers businessmen? Is an investor a busi-
nessman? Is a fiUing station owner a businessman or a labor-
ing man? When I shut my ears to labels and project my im-
agination over the America I have seen with my eyes, I find

228 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

it impossible to visualize a definite army of private business-
men. I can pick out some real entrepreneurs, but in the pic-
ture are millions of corporation employees, engineers, chain
store managers, architects, college presidents, all sorts of peo-
ple. Furthermore, these various groups are frequently in vio-
lent conflict. One group wants free trade and another protec-
tion. One group v^^ants to control retail stores by corporate
devices while the neighborhood store man runs to "govern-
ment" for laws prohibiting chains. Railroads fight shippers.
Coal men fight oil men. Managers of large corporations oust
legal owners from all but a semblance of control over their
"private property." Some groups want a free market; more
powerful groups want prices fixed by executive fiat, and fix
them. Mr. Ford thinks the trouble with "business" is
"finance."
Here are two abstraction ladders, reading down:

Business Business
The oil business The oil business
Oil production Oil production
Hot oil production Standard oil producing corn-
Hot oil wells in Texas panics
Mr. X, a hot oil runner in Mr. Y, of a Standard company

Texas, violently opposed to in Texas, violently in favor

proration of proration

In these cases, referents for "business" at the bottom of the
ladder are found in two gentlemen with policies belligerently
and diametrically opposed.

Certain astute politicians in the United States Chamber of
Commerce and the National Manufacturers' Association
wangle resolutions through their respective organizations. I
suppose these men are as close to the "voice of business" as
one can get. But obviously they represent only a limited
group.

Where does "business" end and "government" begin ."^ At
the margin, we find a hopeless confusion of referents. Ford

READINGS 229

builds cars, and government builds roads. No roads, no Fords.
Is transportation a government or a business activity or a mix-
ture of both? How about enterprises "affected with a public
interest" like the utilities, where rates and investment poUcies
are controlled in name at least by regulatory commissions.?
How about the 600 million dollars the government has lent to
the railroads to bail out the widows and orphans holding rail-
road bonds.'' Suppose these loans had not been made. What
would have been the effect on the investment market and on
"confidence".'* How about government loans for housing
projects.? You cannot tear these operating realities apart —
except in your head.

Meanwhile, one can say categorically that most persons buy-
ing and selling goods and services have benefited to some
degree by government spending programs . . . Such persons
may hold the program morally wrong and economically odi-
ous, but they have not neglected to take the dollars as they
rolled along from reliefer to retailer to wholesaler to manu-
facturer to banker.

Some stockbrokers, manufacturers, merchants, investors,
have lost money because of some laws passed and enforced
since 1933. Undoubtedly true. Some have made money and
avoided loss because of laws passed. Also true. For example,
had it not been for certain fiscal laws passed in March and
April of 1933, most bankers would have lost their banks. No-
body knows what the net effects of laws and the acts of gov-
ernment officials have been on the balance sheets and operating
accounts of all corporations, partnerships, and proprietorships.
Nobody can know. The matter is too complex for appraisal.
Many business activities in 1938 are not as profitable as they
were in 1928. Ha! The New Deal is guilty! But they are con-
siderably more profitable than they were in 1932. Ha! Mr.
Hoover is guilty — and a government dominated by Republi-

230 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

cans is worse for business than a government dominated by
Democrats.

So the conclusions spin round and round until the mind
reels. This kind of thing gets nowhere because it is about
nothing. Generalizations about "government" destroying the
confidence of "business," kicking the stuffing out of "busi-
ness," are just windy salutes in the spring air. People on pri-
vate pay rolls are worried. But people on public pay rolls are
worried too. The whole damned population is worried, and
has been since 1929. Rather than dig into the causes of that
universal worry, people call each other names.

I happen to be an employee on part time of a small corpora-
tion in New York City. The undistributed profits tax hit
this concern pretty hard in 1937. I feel that this tax is some-
times unfair to small companies. I am prepared to ask Con-
gress to exempt certain classes of small corporations. But I
do not propose to accompany the protest with loud yells about
the "government" destroying confidence. You have to take
these things as they come. In 1934, when the Treasury began
to borrow and spend, my business began to pick up. I happen
to be a shrewd enough businessman to grasp the connection.
When the Treasury halted spending last year, my business
took a nose dive. (Name of my company on request.)

Here, you see, I am dealing with real referents — a business
I know thoroughly and a certain act of Congress whose
effects on that business I know. I made out the tax form. I can
talk intelligently, I hope, about this business and this law. But
as a student of semantics the last thing I propose to do is to
identify my business with all "business" or to identify this
law with all "government." Such a technique may be good
enough for naked savages; it is not good enough for civilized
men.

What business enterprise has been hurt? What is the con-
nection between a given law and a given hurt? How was it
hurt? When was it hurt? What laws have helped this busi-

READINGS 231

ness? What is the net loss or gain? Such questions and an-
swers make sense. Referents are found. Communication is
aided. Laws can be inteUigently discussed and perhaps ren-
dered more just.

In this semantic exercise, I have tried to set forth a method.
I have not examined the pohcies of Mr. Roosevelt or the poli-
cies of those who oppose him. This is an analytical essay di-
rected against the whirlwind of bad language which fills the
press and the air waves today. It is not supposed that this
attack will have much tangible effect. But I venture the opin-
ion that until enough of us, in this or some future genera-
tion, begin to separate mental machinery from things under
our noses, we shall continue to tilt at verbal windmills, while
the objective of making the environment a tolerable and
peaceful place in which to live remains only a pious hope.

VII.

SCIENCE AND LINGUISTICS '

by BENJAMIN LEE WHORF

Every normal person in the world, past infancy in years, can
and does talk. By virtue of that fact, every person — civilized
or uncivilized — carries through life certain naive but deeply
rooted ideas about talking and its relation to thinking. Be-
cause of their firm connection with speech habits that have
become unconscious and automatic, these notions tend to be
rather intolerant of opposition. They are by no means entirely
personal and haphazard; their basis is definitely systematic,
so that we are justified in calling them a system of natural
logic — a term that seems to me preferable to the term com-
mon sense, often used for the same thing.

According to natural logic, the fact that every person has

^Copyright, 1940, The Technology Review, edited at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. Reprinted by special permission.

232 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

talked fluently since infancy makes every man his own au-
thority on the process by which he formulates and communi-
cates. He has merely to consult a common substratum of logic
or reason which he and everyone else are supposed to possess.
Natural logic says that talking is merely an incidental process
concerned strictly with communication, not with formulation
of ideas. Talking, or the use of language, is supposed only to
"express" what is essentially already formulated nonlinguisti-
cally. Formulation is an independent process, called thought
or thinking, and is supposed to be largely indifferent to the
nature of particular languages. Languages have grammars,
which are assumed to be merely norms of conventional and
social correctness, but the use of language is supposed to be
guided not so much by them as by correct, rational, or intelli-
gent thinking.

Thought, in this view, does not depend on grammar but
on laws of logic or reason which are supposed to be the same
for all observers of the universe — to represent a rationale in
the universe that can be "found" independently by all intelli-
gent observers, whether they speak Chinese or Choctaw. . . .
Natural logic holds that different languages are essentially
parallel methods for expressing this one-and-the-same rationale
of thought and, hence, differ really in but minor ways which
may seem important only because they are seen at close range.
It holds that mathematics, symbolic logic, philosophy, and so
on, are systems contrasted with language which deal directly
with this realm of thought, not that they are themselves spe-
cialized extensions of language. . . .

... If a race of people had the physiological defect of
being able to see only the color blue, they would hardly
be able to formulate the rule that they saw only blue. The
term blue would convey no meaning to them, their language
would lack color terms, and their words denoting their vari-
ous sensations of blue would answer to, and translate, our
words light, dark, white, black, and so on, not our word blue.

READINGS 233

In order to formulate the rule or norm of seeing only blue,
they would need exceptional moments in which they saw
other colors. The phenomenon of gravitation forms a rule
without exceptions; needless to say, the untutored person is
utterly unaware of any law of gravitation, for it would never
enter his head to conceive of a universe in which bodies be-
haved otherwise than they do at the earth's surface. Like the
color blue with our hypothetical race, the law of gravitation
is a part of the untutored individual's background, not some^
thing he isolates from that background. The law could not
be formulated until bodies that always fell were seen in terms
of a wider astronomical world in which bodies moved in orbits
or went this way and that.

Similarly, whenever we turn our heads, the image of the
scene passes across our retinas exactly as it would if the scene
turned around us. But this effect is background, and we do
not recognize it; we do not see a room turn around us but
are conscious only of having turned our heads in a stationary
room. If we observe critically while turning the head or eyes
quickly, we shall see no motion, it is true, yet a blurring of the
scene between two clear views. Normally we are quite un-
conscious of this continual blurring but seem to be looking
about in an unblurred world. Whenever we walk past a tree
or house, its image on the retina changes just as if the tree
or house were turning on an axis; yet we do not see trees or
houses turn as we travel about at ordinary speeds. Sometimes
ill-fitting glasses will reveal queer movements in the scene as
we look about, but normally we do not see the relative mo-
tion of the environment when we move; our psychic make-up
is somehow adjusted to disregard whole realms of phenomena
that are so all-pervasive as to be irrelevant to our daily lives
and needs.

Natural logic contains two fallacies: First, it does not see
that the phenomena of a language are to its own speakers
largely of a background character and so are outside the criti-

234 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

cal consciousness and control of the speaker who is expound-
ing natural logic. Hence, when anyone, as a natural logician,
is talking about reason, logic, and the laws of correct thinking,
he is apt to be simply marching in step with purely gram-
matical facts that have somewhat of a background character
in his own language or family of languages but are by no
means universal in all languages and in no sense a common
substratum of reason. Second, natural logic confuses agree-
ment about subject matter, attained through use of language,
with knowledge of the linguistic process by which agreement
is attained; i.e., with the province of the despised (and to its
notion superfluous) grammarian. Two fluent speakers, of Eng-
lish let us say, quickly reach a point of assent about the sub-
ject matter of their speech; they agree about what their lan-
guage refers to. One of them. A, can give directions that will
be carried out by the other, B, to A's complete satisfaction.
Because they thus understand each other so perfectly, A and
B, as natural logicians, suppose they must of course know
how it is all done. They think, e.g., that it is simply a matter
of choosing words to express thoughts. If you ask A to ex-
plain how he got B's agreement so readily, he will simply
repeat to you, with more or less elaboration or abbreviation,
what he said to B. He has no notion of the process involved.
The amazingly complex system of linguistic patterns and classi-
fications which A and B must have in common before they can
adjust to each other at all, is all background to A and B.

These background phenomena are the province of the gram-
marian— or of the Hnguist, to give him his more modern
name as a scientist. The word linguist in common, and espe-
cially newspaper, parlance means something entirely different,
namely, a person who can quickly attain agreement about
■subject matter with different people speaking a number of
different languages. Such a person is better termed a polyglot
or a multilingual. Scientific linguists have long understood
that ability to speak a language fluently does not necessarily

READINGS 235

confer a linguistic knowledge of it — i.e., understanding of its
background phenomena and its systematic processes and struc-
ture— any more than ability to play a good game of billiards
confers or requires any knowledge of the laws of mechanics
that operate upon the billiard table.

. . . The background phenomena with which linguistics deals
are involved in all our foreground activities of talking and of
reaching agreement, in all reasoning and arguing of cases, in
all law, arbitration, conciliation, contracts, treaties, public opin-
ion, weighing of scientific theories, formulation of scientific
results. Whenever agreement or assent is arrived at in human
affairs, and whether or not mathematics or other specialized
symbolisms are made part of the procedure, this agreement is
reached by linguistic processes, or else it is not reached. . . .

When linguists became able to examine critically and scien-
tifically a large number of languages of widely different pat-
terns, their base of reference was expanded. ... It was found
that the background Hnguistic system (in other words, the
grammar) of each language is not merely a reproducing in-
strument for voicing ideas but rather is itself the shaper of
ideas, the program and guide for the individual's mental ac-
tivity, for his analysis of impressions, for his synthesis of his
mental stock in trade. Formulation of ideas is not an inde-
pendent process, strictly rational in the old sense, but is part
of a particular grammar and differs, from slightly to greatly,
as between different grammars. We dissect nature along lines
laid down by our native languages. The categories and types
that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find
there because they stare every observer in the face; on the
contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of im-
pressions which has to be organized by our minds — and this
means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds. We cut
nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances
as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to
organize it in this way — an agreement that holds throughout

236 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our
language. The agreement is, of course, an impUcit and un-
stated one, but its terms are absolutely obligatory; we cannot
talk at all except by subscribing to the organization and clas-
sification of data which the agreement decrees.

This fact is very significant for modern science, for it means
that no individual is free to describe nature with absolute im-
partiality but is constrained to certain modes of interpretation
even while he thinks himself most free. The person most
nearly free in such respects would be a linguist familiar with
very many widely different linguistic systems. As yet no lin-
guist is in even any such position. We are thus introduced
to a new principle of relativity, which holds that all observers
are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture
of the imiverse, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar,
or can in some way be calibrated.

This rather startling conclusion is not so apparent if we
compare only our modern European languages, with perhaps
Latin and Greek thrown in for good measure. Among these
tongues there is a unanimity of major pattern which at first
seems to bear out natural logic. But this unanimity exists only
because these tongues are all Indo-European dialects cut to the
same basic plan, being historically transmitted from what was
long ago one speech community; because the modern dialects
have long shared in building up a common culture; and be-
cause much of this culture, on the more intellectual side, is
derived from the linguistic backgrounds of Latin and
Greek. . . .

When Semitic, Chinese, Tibetan, or African languages are
contrasted with our own, the divergence in analysis of the
world becomes more apparent; and when we bring in the
native languages of the Americas, where speech communities
for many millenniums have gone their ways independently of
each other and of the Old World, the fact that languages dis-
sect nature in many different ways becomes patent. The rela-

READINGS 237

tivity of all conceptual systems, ours included, and their de-
pendence upon language stand revealed. . . .

Let us consider a few examples. In English we divide most
of our words into two classes, which have different gram-
matical and logical properties. Class i we call nouns, e.g.,
"house," "man"; Class 2, verbs, e.g., "hit," "run." Many words
of one class can act secondarily as of the other class, e.g., "a
hit," "a run," or "to man" the boat, but on the primary level
the division between the classes is absolute. Our language thus
gives us a bipolar division of nature. But nature herself is not
thus polarized. If it be said that strike, turn, run, are verbs
because they denote temporary or short-lasting events, i.e.,
actions, why then is fist a noun-^* It also is a temporary event.
Why are lightning, spark, wave, eddy, pulsation, flame, storm,
phase, cycle, spasm, noise, emotion, nouns.? They are tem-
porary events. If man and house are nouns because they are
long-lasting and stable events, i.e., things, what then are keep,
adhere, extend, project, continue, persist, grow, dwell, and so
on, doing among the verbs? If it be objected that possess, ad-
here, are verbs because they are stable relationships rather than
stable percepts, why then should equilibrium, pressure, cur-
rent, peace, group, nation, society, tribe, sister, or any kinship
term, be among the nouns? It will be found that an "event"
to us means "what our language classes as a verb" or some-
thing analogized therefrom. And it will be found that it is
not possible to define event, thing, object, relationship, and so
on, from nature, but that to define them always involves a
circuitous return to the grammatical categories of the definer's
language.

In the Hopi language, lightning, wave, flame, meteor, puff
of smoke, pulsation, are verbs — events of necessarily brief du-
ration cannot be anything but verbs. Cloud and storm are at
about the lower limit of duration for nouns. Hopi, you see,
actually has a classification of events (or linguistic isolates)
by duration type, something strange to our modes of thought.

238 LANGUAGE IN ACTION

On the other hand, in Nootka, a language of Vancouver
Island, all words seem to us to be verbs, but really there are
no Classes i and 2; we have, as it were, a monistic view of
nature that gives us only one class of word for all kinds of
events. "A house occurs" or "it houses" is the way of saying
"house," exactly Hke "a flame occurs" or "it burns." These
terms seem to us like verbs because they are inflected for dura-
tional and temporal nuances, so that the suffixes of the word
for house event make it mean long-lasting house, temporary
house, future house, house that used to be, what started out to
be a house, and so on.

Hopi has a noun that covers every thing or being that flies,
with the exception of birds, which class is denoted by another
noun. The former noun may be said to denote the class
FC— B — flying class minus bird. The Hopi actually call in-
sect, airplane, and aviator all by the same word, and feel no
difficulty about it. The situation, of course, decides any pos-
sible confusion among very disparate members of a broad
linguistic class, such as this class FC — B. This class seems to
us too large and inclusive, but so would our class "snow" to
an Eskimo. We have the same word for falling snow, snow
on the ground, snow packed hard like ice, slushy snow, wind-
driven flying snow — whatever the situation may be. To an
Eskimo, this all-inclusive word would be almost unthink-
able; he would say that falling snow, slushy snow, and so on,
are sensuously and operationally different, different things to
contend with; he uses different words for them and for other
kinds of snow. The Aztecs go even farther than we in the
opposite direction, with cold, ice, and snow all represented by
the same basic word with different terminations; ice is the noun
form; cold, the adjectival form; and for snow, "ice mist."

What surprises most is to find that various grand generaliza-
tions of the Western world, such as time, velocity, and matter,
are not essential to the construction of a consistent picture of
the universe. The psychic experiences that we class under these

READINGS 239

headings are, of course, not destroyed; rather, categories de-
rived from other kinds of experiences take over the rulership
of the cosmology and seem to function just as welL Hopi may
be called a timeless language. It recognizes psychological time,
v^hich is much like Bergson's "duration," but this "time" is
quite unlike the mathematical time, T, used by our physicists.
Among the peculiar properties of Hopi time are that it varies
with each observer, does not permit of simultaneity, and has
zero dimensions; i.e., it cannot be given a number greater
than one. The Hopi do not say, "I stayed five days," but "I
left on the fifth day." A word referring to this kind of time,
like the word day, can have no plural . . .

One significant contribution to science from the linguistic
point of view may be the greater development of our sense of
perspective. We shall no longer be able to see a few recent
dialects of the Indo-European family, and the rationalizing
techniques elaborated from their patterns, as the apex of the
evolution of the human mind ... A fair realization of the
incredible degree of diversity of linguistic system that ranges
over the globe leaves one with an inescapable feeling that the
human spirit is inconceivably old; that the few thousand years
of history covered by our written records are no more than
the thickness of a pencil mark on the scale that measures our
past experience on this planet; that the events of these recent
millenniums spell nothing in any evolutionary wise, that the
race has taken no sudden spurt, achieved no commanding
synthesis during recent millenniums, but has only played a
little with a few of the linguistic formulations and views of
nature bequeathed from an inexpressibly longer past. Yet
neither this feeling nor the sense of precarious dependence of
all we know upon linguistic tools which themselves are largely
unknown need be discouraging to science but should, rather,
foster that humility which accompanies the true scientific
spirit, and thus forbid that arrogance of the mind which hin-
ders real scientific curiosity and detachment.

INDEX

Abstracting, 94-5; reasons for, 95-8,
Id

Abstraction, levels of, 94-100; confu-
sion of levels, 103-12

Abstraction ladder, 96; its uses, 97-
102, 103-12

Advertising, 70, 80-3, 177-80

Affective connotations, 69-75, 146-
49. 152-53. 188

Affectiveness of facts, 153-54

Aflectiveness of presymbolic language,
67-9

Affectiveness of two-valued orienta-
tion, 135-36

Alliteration, 144-45

Allusion, 150-52

Antithesis, 145-46

Arnold, T. W., 26, 78

A-town, 1-7

Bacon, Francis, 92
Bell, Eric T., 26
"Bessie," the cow, 93-5
Blocked mind, 118-20, 186-89
Bridgman, P. W., 114
"Business is business," 120
B-ville, 4-7

"Calculation," 97-8

Chase, Stuart, 19

Chimpanzee and automobile, 19, 189

"Churchgoer," 168-71

Circularity of thought, 169-70

Classifications, 114-23

Clothing, as symbols, 21

Combative spirit, 126-27, 130-31,

137-39

Connotation, 46-7. See aUo Affective
connotations; Informative conno-
tations.

Contexts, 42-56; verbal, 44-5, 50;
physical and social, 45-6, 50-1;
historical, 53; ignoring of, 51-3

241

Co-operation, 10-12, 159
"Criminal," 109-10

Dead metaphor, 149-50

Debating, 136-37

Definitions, 46, 54, 89, 98-9, 171

Delaying reactions, 111-12

Delusional worlds, 111-12

Democracy, 133-34, 185-89

Denotation, 46-7

Dictionaries, 42-4, 54

Direct address to listener, 145

Directive uses of language, 78-90;
its promises, 81-3; as foundations
of society, 83-4, 84-8; directives
about language, 89; directive "is,"
88, 120-21

Education, 26, 172-75

Eliot, T. S., 142

Expressing of feelings, 57-60, 135-36,

142, 157-58
Extensional meaning, 46-8
Extensional orientation, 193-95, 198-

200
Extensional world, i6

Freedom of speech and press, 164-66

Hitler, Adolf, 130-31
Hume, David, 193
Humor, 152-53
Husc, H. R., 42

"Hydrostatic paradox of controversy,"
136-37

Index numbers, 121, 195

Inference, 34, 110

Infinite-valued orientation, 134-35,

197
Informative connotations, 69, 74-5
"Insoluble" problems, 183-86
"Insurance," 1-7

242

INDEX

Intensional meaning, 46-8

Intensional orientation: defined, 167-
68; from education, 172-75; from
fiction, 175-77; from advertising,
177-80; and "insoluble" problems,
184-86; social consequences, 186-
89; symptoms, 195-98

Interaction of words, 53-4

Irony, 152

"Is," 88, 104, 120-21, 194

"Jews," 106-09, 119
Judgments, 32-4, 38-9, 109-11

Knowledge, acquired verbally, 15-18;

how abstracted, 92-7
Korzybski, Alfred, 96, 105, 112, 121

Language, 10-15, 22; directives about,
89

Levels of abstraction, 92-100; con-
fusion of, 103-12

Levels of writing, 154-56

Levy-Bruhl, Lucien, 106

Linguistic naivete, 23-7

Literature, 151-52, 156-59, 198-200

"Loaded" words, 35

Locke, John, 30, 125

Magazine fiction, 155-56, 175-77

Maier, N. R. F., i8i

Malinowski, B., 57

"Map" and "territory," 15-18; "map"
language, 32; "maps" of nonexist-
ent "territories," 26, 75; discard-
ing of old "maps," 190-92

Mathematics, 97-8, loi

Meaning, intensional and extensional,
46-7, 50; never exactly the same
twice, 49-50

Metaphor, 146-47

Miles, Josephine, 142

Mob spirit, 137-39

Multi-valued orientation, 131-34

"Necessary connection" between sym-
bol and thing symbolized, 22, 115,
196

"Negroes," 11 7-1 8

Nervous system, co-operative use of,

11; imperfections of, 92-3
Noises for noise's sake, 61
Non-verbal affective appeals, 80-1
Non-sense questions, 47-9, 60, 115,
191-92

Ogden, C. K., and Richards, I. A.,

67
"One word, one meaning," 49
Oppositions, 128-29
Oververbalization, 168-72

Pathos, 152

Periodic sentences, 145

Personification, 149

Poetry, 157-58, 200

"Politics," 167

Pooling of knowledge, 12-15

Pound, Ezra, 164

Presymbolic uses of language, 57-66

Prevention of silence, 61-2

Propaganda. See Directive uses of

language.
"Pulp" literature, 155
"Purr" words, 58-60

"Race" and "nationality," 116-18

Rat, Dr. Maier's, 181-84

Reading towards sanity, 198-200

"Relief," 1-7, 168

Repetition of sounds, 144-45

Reports, how to write, 30-41

Rhyme, 144

Rhythm, 144-45

Richards, I. A., and Ogden, C. K.,

67
Ritual, 84-8, 89-90; ritual language,

62-4
Robinson, James H., 10, 181
Rumor, 110-11

Science, 31-2, 123, 134-35, I59. 189,

199-200
Scientific attimde, 190-92
Seeing and believing, 105
Signal reaction, 19-20. See also

Thinking like savages.
Simile, 146-47
"Slick" magazines, 155
"Slang," 148-49

INDEX

243

"Slanting," 35-8

"Snarl words," 58-60

Social conversation, 61-2

Society: made possible by language,

10-15; beld together by directives,

83-4; and intensional orientations,

186-89
Symbol reaction, 19-20
Symbolic process, 20-2. See also Ex-

tensional orientation.

Talking too much, 168-72
Thinking like savages, 24, 26-7,

105-06, 108-09, 111-12, 119, 183-

84, 188-89
"Transcendental reality," 26
"Truth," 121-23, 156-58
Two-valued orientation, 125-39

Veblen, Thorstein, 21
Verbal hypnotism, 143-44
Verbal taboo, 72-4
Verbal world, 16-18
Verifiability of reports, 30-2

"We" device, 145

Word -deluge, 25

Words as a barrier, 166-67

Words, unconscious attitudes towards,

7-9
Words and future events, 75-6, 79-90
Word-magic, 73, 90, 105-06
"Women-drivers," 171
"WPA workers," 171
Writing, its effect on human progress,

12-14

"You" device, 145

Date Dye

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